Membership of one year is paid quartly

[jaapjansma]

Hey,

At my clients organisation they have a membership which last for a year and is renewed every year. The membership is paid in 4 terms, every quarter the member pays via direct debit. The membership has a fixed period: From 1 jan. till 31 dec.

In CiviMember I can set up a membership and record a payment but that result in just one payment (contribution) for a whole year.

The question is can I setup quartlerly payments for a membership? If not how do I set a fixed membership period of 3 months. Always starting on 1st of Jan, 1st of April, 1st of July, and the 1st of October?

Thanks for your help,
Jaap Jansma

[joanne]

What happens if if someone wants to join on, say, 6 July? Do they have to pay the fees for the March and June quarters?

What are you wanting from CiviCRM:

• reminder emails for payments due?
• access to a member-only web content?
• ?

[jaapjansma]

I would say that they pay the quarters since they are a member. Possibly with a rollover date. E.g. we could setup a fixed quarter membership that after 30 days the user would not pay for the current quarter but for the next quarter.

So someone signing up on 6th of july pays for the quarter of july and october. But someone signing up at the 6th of august will pay only for the next quarter which is october.

[joanne]

You can't set up quarterly payments for a membership, but you might be able to get close to you want by creating 4 fixed term memberships of 3 months each starting on the first day of a quarter. 

You would use a membership price set with each membership as a separate field that is only visible when it should be.  ie from what you have said the October quarter membership would only be visible during from 1 August to 31 October then the January quarter membership would take over.

It isn't ideal, because you would have to manually update the visibility dates for the price sets each year. Also auto-renew doesn't work with price sets and transitioning from one membership to the other could be problematic.  That is why I asked my second unanswered question about what you want from civicrm for these memberships.

Sorry if I am telling you what you already know, but I find that even some quite experienced Civi people don't use and don't know much about price sets

(Also I can see you name your quarters with the first month of the quarter, but in Aus we use the end month of the quarter to name the quarter, so our March quarter would run 1 Jan to 31 March - I wasn't being dense about how your year was to be split. )

[petednz]

trying to recall if we have had to tie Pledges in with memberships - think so - if that sounds useful i will point eileen here

[jaapjansma]

Thanks Joanne. I am not sure if 3 memberships are the solution. Maybe I will develop the quarter option into the membershiptype period.

Linking pledges to membership sounds great but it would be nicer to link them with recurring contributions.

[petednz]

i think we do that too 

[petednz]

but not necessarily for the same project

[jaapjansma]

Pete do you mean you will link memberships to recurring payments? Or do you mean that you will also develop/use the quarter method?

[petednz]

ha - i think i meant

we have done some Linking pledges to membership
and we have done some linking pledges with recurring contributions
but not necessarily at same time 

one of us needs to get eileen to give a more robust answer i suspect

[Upperholme]

A key question here is what you want to achieve, and I think Joanne has asked it.

Are your members unreliable? What needs to happen if a payment fails?

Could you consider changing to a rolling quarterly membership?

[jaapjansma]

That is a good question, what is going to happen if we have a yearly membership paid every 3 months... I would say the membership is still valid. The same is true when we have a yearly membership which paid all in once, what would happen if the payment fails?

A rolling membership is not possible because we always want the membership start on the 1st of jan, 1st of april, 1st of july and the 1st of october.

Is my conclusion right if I say that this is not possible at the moment?

[jaapjansma]

I have solved this issue within an extension: https://github.com/CiviCooP/org.civicoop.quartelymembershippayment

This extension adds a checkbox to membership types. If checked the membership type is paid per quarter (in addition, if the membership duration is for one year).

When a membership is created or renewed the contributions for the left quarters are created