CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I would like to bump this.

If you have a situation in which two people might be responsible for renewing/paying for the same membership, and they do not communicate to each other that they have already paid for it (or one person with a poor memory, and no email receipt to remind them), they will not be prevented from submitting the same membership form and paying again. When testing on the latest SVN, I can resubmit the same membership payment as many times as I wish, with both pay later and payment processor options.

I tried repeating this on the sandbox, and encountered a DB error (likely due to a change someone else has made?).

Since there is a confirmation screen, would this be an appropriate time to check for duplicate payments against that membership for the contact, and flag a message preventing them from continuing, until such time as the membership is up for renewal or the payment is of "cancelled" or "failed" status in the back-end?

In the meantime, I could use a hook to do this?

Many thanks,
Simon

Thanks Pete.

Sorry for the long delay.

Very true, but an organisation may not wish to let their members renew at the same rate each year. They might have a date by which they have reviewed the membership cost, terms and conditions, whether the membership will continue... If the organisation decided to make a significant change or close the service, they would need to contact everyone who had renewed early/issue refunds, etc. Also, by restricting renewals to a date (explicit or range, like 3 months prior to the renewal date), I imagine it might be easier for finance, who may otherwise need to attribute the income to a different year in the future - though it's very unlikely that enough would renew in advance to present a cashflow issue.

I think the existing workflow might be a bit clearer if members were told their current and new renewal date before confirming payment, and given the option to renew X months/years if the organisation wishes to allow it, instead of resubmitting the form a 2nd/3rd time.

A renewal open-date is certainly a requirement for the organisation I am working with, so it looks like we will need to use a hook to run a check on the authenticated user.

Thanks,
Simon