This problem is causing a lot of frustration to our members, and extra work for our member help team. Members with auto-recurring payments fret that there membership is about to lapse and renew manually. There should be separate emails and email settings for auto-pay members simply notifying them that there credit card will be charged on mm/dd/yy for their membership.

If nothing else, at least if there was a macro to show their setting (On or Off) and the 4 digit credit card number, we could assure the auto-pay members that they don't have to do anything about there renewal unless there credit card has changed.

Has this problem been fixed, since it was raised in 2012? We have members who switch off recurring payments, change their credit card, choose to generate an invoice and pay it by check. These members need renewal reminders, while others with functioning recurring payment set up should NOT receive the same renewal reminders. How should we handle this situation?

Emphatically agree, this is a very broken model. I was surprised to find that automatic reminders went out to those with recurring payments enabled. From my conversation with support folks, apparently this is even true for the "renewal day" reminder. You'd think that at least it would process the renewal before processing the reminder. As it is, I have to include a bunch of "please ignore the spam if you're on auto-renewal, it's not our fault, WildApricot is just lame" verbiage in the messages.

And no, it's not a question of membership level. The *availability* of the recurring payments feature can be turned on or off per level, but that doesn't mean that all members of a given level have it *enabled*. We have effectively only one membership level, and like others have described, we have a mix of automatic renewal and manual renewal members.

We have the exact same problem that user Luchia has. Many of our members were imported from our previous membership software and can not or will not use Paypal. They pay cash / check / each month.

I have turned off email reminders for all members because the majority use recurring payments and many complained about the pointless reminder emails. But this means that the members that are not using paypal don't get reminders any more.

It's a big hassle that would be fixed if there were different settings for members that have recurring payments setup.

We have many members of each of the levels who are not using the recurring payment option. One, when I originally imported our database when we started a couple of years ago, none of them were set up with recurring payments. Two, whenever we have an event, we offer guest a promotional special to become a member. People fill out a card with their membership information and give it to me on the way out. Then, I create these new members manually, so there is no recurring payment set up. Three, many of our members prefer to pay their memberships with a check, so recurring payment never gets set up for them. For many, I get emails asking me to stop their recurring payments if they can't figure out how to do it themselves.

So, I have a random mix of members from different levels with some having recurring payments and some not. I would love to be able to set up an automatic email different for those who have recurring payments so they don't feel harassed by incessant renewal reminders. I hope that makes sense.

Let me dig a bit further:

Recurring payment is set at the membership level - so when applicants join and pay, they all accept the recurring billing at the same time.

So how do you have people on the same level but not on recurring payment?

(The only way I can think of right away is they cancel it afterwards - or if their recurring charge bounces for a few days, payment processors might deactivate it automatically)

Yes, recurring payments. They are not their own level. For example, we have a senior level. Some of these seniors have opted in for recurring payments while others have not. For the wish list, I would like to be able to send a customized message to these folks who have recurring payments letting them know we will charge their card on their renewal date, and that's it. They don't need to be sent the reminders that are automatically sent out, which is what is causing the confusion.

Automatic renewal - you mean what we call 'recurring payments'? http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Recurring+payments

Recurring payments can be enabled/disabled for the whole membership level only - so I would assume those members are on a separate level? In this case you should be able to set their reminder emails as desired since these are set for each level sepately.