Member renewal options in v2.0

[petednz]

Good to see the 'renew' feature in the 2.0 sandbox.
A few questions.
The default has been set so that if a membership is renewed, the 'start date' autofills with today's date - I wonder if that is the common practice among organisations. Certainly the ones I have been involved with, the renewal date would be the day after the End Date of the previous subscription - unless the membership has actually lapsed.
I wonder if either
- this can be controlled under a 'Renew' item in Administer CiviCRM
- if it can't be controlled easily can you canvass some users to see how many would prefer it to default to the day after the End Date

Also, the version in the sandbox has a bug. http://sandbox.civicrm.org/civicrm/contact/view?reset=1&force=1&cid=112&selectedChild=member

I created a member
JOIN = 1 Feb 2006
START = 1 feb 2006
END = (auto based on 1 year sub)
So this created an expired member
I then hit RENEW (and the StartDate was auto filled to 11 Feb 2008) I reset the Start Date to be 1 Feb 2007 and Save - but the resulting membership dates are
START = Feb 11 2008 (ie it has autofilled today's date even though I believe I overwrote this - twice!)

Really keen to see this feature working as it saves a lot of clicking around!

[petednz]

woops looks like i dropped this in the wrong section. presume someone kind and clever will put it in the right section (can't see that I can)

[petednz]

Also curious as to why the Member Report - CiviMember - http://sandbox.civicrm.org/civicrm/member?reset=1 shows the listed people as NEW even though their START DATES and JOIN DATES are more than the 3 months 'new' period set in the membership rules

Which also makes me wonder why the Status Rules are the same for all Membership Types but that should really be another post.

[speleo]

Start Date sounds like a bug.

Keeping Membership Status updated and using the Renewal Reminder Day function requires that on your server you setup a "cron job" to run a script which will update membership statuses and send out reminders.
A command-line php script - bin/UpdateMembershipRecord.php.txt - is provided which updates the status for each membership record based on your configured status rules.

taken from http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Membership+Types

[petednz]

The cron job suggestion made me think about going back in to the Sandpit and opening one of the existing memberships and hitting Save in case the status rules had been changed by someone subsequently. And not only did it come up and not allow the save because the End Date was before the Start Date (which is a bug we have commented on in 1.9 - so good to know that may be sorted) but it also updated the Status to what I was expecting.

I will wait on one of the 'owners' to say about if the bug needs logging.

[Dave Greenberg]

The default has been set so that if a membership is renewed, the 'start date' autofills with today's date - I wonder if that is the common practice among organisations. Certainly the ones I have been involved with, the renewal date would be the day after the End Date of the previous subscription - unless the membership has actually lapsed.
I wonder if either
- this can be controlled under a 'Renew' item in Administer CiviCRM
- if it can't be controlled easily can you canvass some users to see how many would prefer it to default to the day after the End Date

Also, the version in the sandbox has a bug. http://sandbox.civicrm.org/civicrm/contact/view?reset=1&force=1&cid=112&selectedChild=member

I created a member
JOIN = 1 Feb 2006
START = 1 feb 2006
END = (auto based on 1 year sub)
So this created an expired member
I then hit RENEW (and the StartDate was auto filled to 11 Feb 2008) I reset the Start Date to be 1 Feb 2007 and Save - but the resulting membership dates are
START = Feb 11 2008 (ie it has autofilled today's date even though I believe I overwrote this - twice!)

Peter - The field you're referring to as "Start Date" is actually labelled "Renewal Date". It's purpose is to provide a "modified date" for the civicrm_membership_log record. The renewal process actually works (in my testing) the way you'd like it to - it sets a new "End Date" for the membership by adding the membership period to the current End Date UNLESS the membership is Expired. In that case it should set the new "End Date" by adding the membership period to "Renewal Date".

I suspect based on your feedback that some further descriptive text would be useful on that screen - suggestions welcome :-)

That said, the fact that Renewal Date is editable - but actually saves current date to the membership log regardless of user input - is a bug. I'll enter an issue for it.

Finally - thanks for pointing out that the "sample membership data" on the demo is confusing (many memberships show End Date prior to Start Date, statuses are out of whack etc.). I'll see if we can get that cleaned up at some point.

[petednz]

Hi Dave - thanks for the clarification. I was tripping up on how it dealt with Expired. But yes, maybe some other wording could help - something like "Date Renewal Enacted" or "Date Renewal entered"? And maybe (though it seems way long now I have written it)

Renewing will add the normal membership period on to the End Date of the previous period for members whose status is Current or Grace. For members who are Expired, the renewal will create a membership period commencing from the "Date Renewal Enacted". This date can be adjusted, including being set for the day after the previous membership Expired, if continuous membership is required.

[Dave Greenberg]

Peter - I've implemented text changes / addition based on your suggestions - thx! I've also posted a bug fix issue on the "Renewal Date Entered" problem here:

http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-2642

... it would be great if you can review / retest once that fix has been implemented!

[petednz]

Time to come back to this. Dave - as far as I can see the functionality is doing what is expected - so good fix.

However, I think a helpful tweak would be that on the RENEW page, under Membership End Date we have a line something like

End Date if Renewed - this would show the date that will be applied based on the rules (ie from last End Date if Grace, from 'Date Renewal Entered' if Expired.) - and could be changed if needed.

This would make it much more foolproof, and overcomes the natural tendency (IMO) to look at the date in Date Renewal Entered and assume that is what will be applied.

Hope you think this is helpful.

[petednz]

Ah ha - and it overcomes a problem we are facing with a changing system which means that we actually want to start some REnewals from date entered, even though they are still in Grace period (which means that the Rules apply the renewal from the date of the last 'cycle').

[Dave Greenberg]

Peter - It sounds like you are suggesting the addition of an EDITABLE "End Date When Renewed" field to the renewal form. I can see that this would add flexibility. Not sure if might also confuse things for some folks ??

In any case, it's a significant enough change that we need to defer it to a subsequent release. It may make sense to combine this with some changes to allow users to "upgrade" a membership type as part of the renewal process - which is something that a number of users have requested. It would be great for you to review the current suggestions on the wiki - and incorporate this idea....

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviMember+-+Phase+2+Specifications

[petednz]

Comment made on wiki - hope i have it clear

[petednz]

From what I can see, if i have a member who had a membership
Jan 1 07 to Dec 31 08

and I hit renew, it leaves the Start date as Jan 1 07 and changes the End Date to Dec 31 08

This is not what I was expecting - has an update brought in a bug - or is this what you intended?

[Dave Greenberg]

This is intended behavior. The "design" is that the period from "Start" - "End" shows uninterrupted membership period. We set a new start date IF the membership has expired prior to renewal. Join Date is intended to stay fixed regardless of renewals, interruptions, etc.

Note that this design was based on initial input from several orgs - and I'm not aware of anyone subsequently saying either that this fits their model / expections OR that it doesn't. If you think this is NOT valid behavior - it would be good to engage others using CiviMember in a discussion as to pros and cons.

[lcdweb]

Dave,
I'm getting some unexpected behavior with the membership renewal function. Let me explain the behavior, and then indicate what I'm pretty sure the problem is.

I just upgraded a 1.9 site to 2.0.2. This particular site has been using CiviCRM since about June of 2007, so it went from 1.8 to 1.9 to 2.0. There was a lot of data imported from the prior database system, so for the membership records, I have about 10+ years of records listed.

Actual Behavior: I enter a record, browse to the membership tab, and click renew for an existing, active membership. I complete the renewal form as appropriate and save. I'm returned to the membership tab where I see a NEW membership record created with start/end dates for the current membership period (though the period SHOULD have been appended to the existing current record). In other words, the current active membership was 1/1/2007 to 12/31/2008 (one year static period; they've already renewed for this year). The NEW record created when I used the renewal process was for 1/1/2008 to 12/31/2008.

Expected Behavior: I expected the renewal to extend the existing record by a year, not create a new record. Thus the existing active record would be changed to an end date of 12/31/2009.

Observed Behavior with Further Testing: If I take that new record created, and "renew" it, the behavior works as expected. It extends the end date to 2009 for the existing record.

So...
It appears that imported records, and perhaps records created prior to 2.0 through the admin, which lack an existing relationship between the membership and contribution record, are not able to be renewed.

The renewal option is awesome, so if there was some way to repair this so that existing non-2.0-created records can be renewed, that would be great. I'm guessing that for most organizations that have at least a 1 yr. renewal period, fixing this is not urgent, and could be handled procedurally for a while. Since the membership+contribution in a single form is new, orgs could use the membership "edit" function and make use of the contribution subform for the current dues period, then look for the renewal fix in future releases.

I tried to replicate this issue on the Joomla sandbox, but actually got a slightly different (and possibly more disturbing) behavior. If you go to Dougél McFrugèl on the sandbox, you'll see two membership records. The one with start/end of 1/1/08 to 12/31/08 with a source of "lcdweb demo" is the one I imported -- it was not created in Civi -- I imported it (that's the key). If you click renew for that membership record, it actually extends/renews the membership record for the OTHER membership listed there (which obviously is troublesome). I suspect that if I were to delete that other membership record it would behave as I've outlined above. But I don't want to delete it so that you can see this other odd behavior.

Let me know if you want me to create a Jira issue for this, and let me know if you want the two issues combined or broken out into two.

-Brian