CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

From the sound of it you are using rolling memberships.

What happens to the membership start date when someone renews depends on whether or not they are financial when they renew and whether or not you have a grace period set.  What are your membership and membership status settings?   

If you are running a 12 month rolling membership then John is still a financial member when he renews on 10 December.  If that is the case I am not sure why you would want to link his finish date to his renewal date.  You would be penalising him for renewing slightly early by giving him only 11 months of membership. 

JohnM,  best practice is to start a new topic for a new problem.   It confuses everyone if you hijack an existing one.

Santrim,

You seem to have a complaint that is exactly the opposite of the original one posted by bobbyhbl.

Unlike the one from JohnM, I think your problem is sufficiently related to be dealt with is this same thread.

The key to this should be your membership and membership status settings.

Both you and bobbyhbl if he still has a problem should:
 
1. Go to Administer>civimember>membership types. Find the membership you are concerned about, select edit, then record the Duration, Period type and Fixed period rollover day if there is one.


2. Go to the Adminster> civiMember> membership status rules.  Note which of New, Current, Grace, and Expired  are enabled.  For each one that is enabled select edit and then record Start event, start event adjustment, end event, end event adjustment and whether or not Current Membership has a tick in the box.

3. Report it all back here.

Bobbyhbl,

You didn't tell me if there was a tick in the Current Membership box for each of Current , expired and pending, but I expect the answer is Yes, no and no respectively. This means that Current is treated as a "current membership" and Expired and Pending aren't.  (For your simple set up the importance of this setting may not be obvious, but it does become important if you also used the membership status Grace, or had other custom statuses) 

With your memberships set up as they are, the behaviour you describe for 'John Smith' is exactly what you would expect from Civi.

First an explanation of of member since, start date and end date.

Member since is a record of the date a contact first joins your organisation.  Civi will never change it automatically, however you could adjust it manually if you wanted to.

Start Date is the date the current period of continuous membership started for the contact.
If the membership status a person has when they renew is considered a "current membership"  then the membership start date is not changed.
If the membership status a person has when they renew is not considered a "current membership"  then the membership start date is reset to the date they renewed.

End Date What happens to the end date when someone renews depend on whether or not the membership status they have when they renew is considered a "Current membership".
If the membership status they have when they renew is considered a "current membership" then 12 months is added to their existing end date. 
If the membership status they have when they renew is not considered a "current membership" then 12 months is added to their new start date.

Second, for your membership set up with just Current, Expired and Pending let's look at two examples.

Your example of John Smith. He joined on 5 Jan 2010, so his Member Since and start date were set to 5 Jan 2010 and his end date was set to 4 Jan 2011.  When he renews on 10 December 2010 his membership status is Current.  The membership status of Current  is considered a "current membership".  His start date stays the same ( ie 5 Jan 2010) and 12 months is added to his existing end date so it becomes 4 Jan 2012.

Now let's consider Martha Jones who also joined on 5 Jan 2010 for 12 months.  She didn't 'renew' her membership until 6 Feb 2011, so she had a membership status of Expired at the time she renewed and Expired is not considered a "current membership".  Her start date is reset to 6 Feb 2011.  Her end date is set to 12 months after her new start date ie 5 Feb 2012.

As I said in my first reply to you, I have no idea why you want to penalise John Smith for renewing early by only giving him 12 months from his renewal date not 12 months added to his existing end date.

If you absolutely must to do that, then you could achieve your aims for the start and end dates by un-ticking the "current membership" box for the membership status Current.  However, that will quite possibly create a new set of problems as none of your memberships will be considered "current memberships".  I wouldn't advise going down that path.

When someone joins or renews they get an activity of Membership signup or Membership renewal.

You can use an advanced search to find all the people with those activities between any dates you want.  That would be the best way to find out who needs a new membership card. 

I would leave the membership start dates alone.  There are no simple settings you can change to achieve what you want.  From my very, very limited knowledge of customisations I am guessing that you might be able to use a (postprocess?) hook to change the start date, but then I suspect Civi's inbuilt membership rules would mean the end date was also be changed.

Whoops, that didn't work. I'm going to start a new topic.  Thanks though.