Re: Pro rata payment of membership fees

[CirclePhil]

This is also an issue for me right now.

Just a thought - could you do it via price sets? They allow "Active On" and "Expiry On" functionality, so you would have a January, February, March (etc.) price set and they'd only be active during the relevant month.

Having said that, the reason i don't do this even though it would be useful for me is that it is a lot of work (setting up 12 price sets and then, inevitably, resetting them at the end of the year as membership fees change).

This is something I gave some thought to, but have now ruled out because no matter what you charge for a membership type, it will still be for the same period e.g. if someone signs up in July, you can charge them half price but the membership still runs for the entire year, rather than half of it. Price sets in general seem more set up for providing bundles/extras/discounts than for altering the nature of your membership types. Sadly.

The other option is CiviDiscount - although I'm not clear whether that is now stable. That allowed percentage discounts, so you would just have to allow a discount code for e.g. July that was a 50% discount on calendar year memberships.

CiviDiscount sounds good but then wouldn't you still have an annual membership that ran July-June if the user signed up then, rather than the desired dates?

Whilst there are definitely options for charging the right amount, there doesn't seem to be a way of translating this into an altered membership period.

The best solution I've come up with so far is to set up a joining membership type that runs monthly and then asking members to switch to annual membership in December. Which is a pretty rubbish way of going about it!

I'm sure someone here can do better than that! Or am I asking the impossible?

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey there,

I don't think you are asking the impossible but (unless someone can prove me wrong) I don't think this is something that can be easily (and neatly) done with CiviCRM as it stands at the moment.

One way of approaching the problem is to development this functionality (either as an extension, or as an improvement to core).

This would mean spending time (and possibly money) on development so I appreciate it might not be for you, but I wanted to put it out there for you and others reading this, as a suggestion for how you can achieve this functionality.

[CirclePhil]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the reply.

I've been pointed in the direction of this thread: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,11762.0.html

What do you think?

[Michael McAndrew]

That code looks kind of promising, and like something that could be developed into an extension.  Are you a developer yourself? Or do you know any?  Would be good to package something like that up for use by yourself and others

[CirclePhil]

I'm not a developer, but I work for a development company. We're looking at it for a project, so it depends a lot on the client. Agree it would be handy.