Our organization also applies a late fee (of $50) to each membership that does not pay by a certain date. Outside of generating a new invoice with the add'l fee for all those memberships that have not paid on time, I do not know how I'll handle this our first year using W.A. I will probably have to manually delete the outstanding unpaid invoice and create a new one for each person awaiting paying with the late fee. I asked a W.A. tech support about setting an expiation time/date in an invoice so that at midnight of date, the invoice would expire and no longer be useable/accessible to member, but this feature is not available.

I kinda figured that, but wasn't sure if I'd just missed it in the long Roadmap list or something. Since your answer referred me to the list, I thought maybe there was some reference to it there.

No :) This was my answer on your question "Anything on this yet?". Our Product Roadmap page shows up to date state of where we are and what are our plans. So, this one is not in plans yet.

I don't see this listed there at all. Am I supposed to?

All our up to date plans are here: http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Product+roadmap

Anything on this yet? Been another year and we are entering our renewal period again and are faced with the same problem again. A checkbox with a space to enter the late fee amount on the admin's renewals panel would be terrific:

"If not renewed in ___ days, add $___ late fee."

~ Kim

I think this is a very useful feature to have. Whether it is considered punitive or not is a subjective matter and not really relevant to whether or not the feature should be available. Some organizations definitely have a legitimate use for it.

Having said that, using different membership levels really doesn't work well because there is not way to automatically switch them back to a member in good standing once they've paid their late member dues. The admins would need to remember to do this (which they don't) otherwise the next renewal they will be prompted to renew at the late member level, even if they are not late.

Manually turning on an extra fee field is too labor intensive and error prone. Plus it carries the same problem with remembering to turn it off once the member has renewed so that they don't automatically get charged again next year.

From an implementation point of view, I think having one more option on the admin's renewals panel where you check a box if you want to add a late fee once you enter the grace period and another option for a late fee (possibly a different amount than the grace period fee) for when they enter the Lapsed status.

I think this is very common and useful to encourage timely renewals.

Kim Skimmons

Some insightful details from one of our clients:

Right now, we have a 60 day grace-period for our members, during which they can maintain their membership if they pay their dues along with the added $25 late fee. Currently, the day after they are due, I go in to the accounts of each member who hasn’t paid and click the “Extra Charges Multiple Choice” field that adds the late fee to their renewal invoice once they begin the renewal wizard (big pain, but I suppose I could do an export/change/import if there were too many). After that grace-period, I have to manually “Suspend” the memberships of everyone who hasn’t paid (also a big pain). Ideally, I could tell WA to add the late fee on December 2nd of each year and also tell it to suspend their memberships if they haven’t paid with 60 days of that date. We have found that we don’t really like the auto-creation of renewal invoices to everyone (we tried it this year) because their invoices might change depending on what optional features they choose to add during the renewal wizard. So, it might not be as easy as adding an additional invoice to their records. But if that’s the way you choose to go, we would be OK with that. It would still be an improvement over the way we currently have to do it.

No update so far

Any update on this? Kind of a critical piece of collections.

Either option would be equal in terms of development and design time to spend, so I would stick to original idea.

Nevermind, I see the other thread on changing levels upon renewal. :)

We also use this kind of business process. We've implemented a change of level from "Member" to "Late Paying Member" and we have to manually move members back after they renew. Luckily we are a small organization.

Implementing a late fee structure would be the most elegant solution, but a simpler solution comes to mind: how about just having actions that can be triggered upon renewal. In this case, upon renewal of a "Late Paying Member" we would change their level to "Member" again.

This feature would be perfect for us we have a yearly membership fee that if not recieved in 15 days results in a $25 late fee. We have 2 membership levels and would like it set up so that after the time frame passes it automatically adds $25 to each membership level to renew.

We would really like this feature too... Late fees for late renewals OR the option to get a discount if you renew early... either way the incentive is the same and we'd love to offer something to keep folks from lapsing

Meagan

Eric - sorry, no news for now. This is still in our plans but a few more pieces of the puzzle have to fall in place to allow us handle this.

Any update on this? Any plans to add it to a future release? I renew my support for this idea! Thanks!

Eric

We also would like to have this feature.

We currently have a common renewal date for all members (as a ski club, we have a very seasonal calendar year). We offer "Early Bird Membership" at a discount from June 1 - Sept. 31, then raise the membership fee to the "regular" rate. This is available for both renewal and new members, and is positioned as a "reward" for early sign up, rather than a "late fee"

Currently I just change the name and price of the Registration Type on Oct. 1, but it would be great if I could set this up automatically in WA.

I agree that something needs to be implemented.

In another thread, we brought up the question of late renewal dates. (Should it be 1 year from payment or 1 year from original renewal date?) Seems like these two issues can be combined into one solution.

The workarounds suggested sound good too. I especially like VCOMA's idea of elevating the member status of those who renew early or on time.

YES!! Please make this happen. We just joined WA and at least 100 of our 700 members are ALWAYS paying an extra $20 every year because they always miss the deadline. I have yet to figure out how I'm going to use WA and still charge this late fee. But if you add this functionality, I won't have to send out additional invoices or something. PLEASE ADD SOON!

Thanks,

Eric

[quote user="jkunrein"]

I agree with HHuckeba that it would be great to have preferential pricing for current members (members whose membership has not expired yet). It seems it might incentivize members who don't renew until they need to "use" their membership again.

As a workaround, is it possible to use coupons for this? For example, on June 1, could I send an email to all members whose memberships expire in June, with a coupon code for $10 off of their renewals through the end of June? It wouldn't match up to people's renewal dates exactly, but it would be a pretty fair workaround.

[/quote]Seems like a good workaround.

A good solution could be to build preferential pricing into membership levels. Renewals before a certain cut off date (3 months from expiry) can be cheaper by a fixed amount or percentage. Or membership levels could include automatic coupons, to be sent out at various times before renewal is due.

Overdue fees seem punative to me. For some organizations and businesses, they could make sense though.