Contributions and dues

You’ll need: Member contributions, Memberships, Transactions — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Most member organisations collect money regularly from members. Member contributions describe what is expected.

What a contribution defines

A contribution has a name — what it is for — and an expected contribution per member.

Its contribution frequency is one time, monthly or yearly. A deadline for contributions sets when it is due.

And mandatory for custom membership types says which tiers must pay it. That is the field that makes contributions flexible: a building fund every member owes, a chapter levy only regional members owe, a one-time joining fee for new tiers.

Expected versus received

The contribution record says what should arrive. The money that does arrive is a transaction, like every other payment.

Holding those apart is what makes the whole thing useful. Because the expectation is recorded independently of the receipts, the organisation can answer the question every committee asks: who has paid and who has not.

If you only recorded receipts, you would know your total and nothing about the gap.

Set the deadline honestly

A deadline that everybody ignores trains members that deadlines are decorative, and the next one is ignored too.

Pick a date the organisation will actually act on — a reminder, a list read at a meeting, a lapse in standing — and then act on it. One enforced deadline is worth five aspirational ones.

Separate contributions from membership fees

A membership fee buys standing: you are a member of this tier until this date.

A contribution is something members owe because they are members — a levy, a fund, a subscription to a shared purpose. They behave differently and are reported differently, and merging them means you can never say how much of what a member paid was dues and how much was the building fund.

Chasing is a relationship, not a debt collection

The contributions summary tells you who has not paid. In a member organisation that list is mostly people who forgot, moved, or are having a hard year — not people avoiding you.

Use it early and lightly. A reminder in week two is a courtesy; a demand in month six is a confrontation, and it usually costs you the member as well as the money.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, create a monthly contribution mandatory for one tier only, record payment from some members and not others, then run the contributions summary and read the gap.