Membership reports

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

Membership reports carry a report type and, where relevant, a liquidity pool. Four types, four questions.

Memberships status

Who is a member, at what tier, and whether they are current.

This is the register. Read it for the number that matters more than the total: how many are lapsing soon. A membership organisation with flat numbers and a wave of expiries next month is not stable, it is about to shrink — and that is visible now, cheaply, if anybody looks.

Contributions summary

What was expected against what came in, and who is short.

The gap is the report. A total tells you how the fund is doing; the list of who has not paid is what somebody can act on this week, while a gentle reminder is still the right instrument.

Loans summary

What has been lent from the fund, to whom, and what is outstanding against its deadline.

Read it before every committee meeting. Not because anybody is suspected, but because a fund where the position is reviewed regularly and openly stays a fund people trust.

Shared fund summary

The pool itself: what is in it, and how it is held.

Together with the loans summary this is the financial picture of the fund — what is in the pot, what is out on loan, and whose it is.

Reading them together

Each answers one question and the health of the organisation is in the combination:

   memberships    is the membership growing or quietly lapsing?
   contributions  is money arriving as agreed?
   loans          is what went out coming back?
   shared fund    is the pot what everyone believes it is?

An organisation can look fine on any one of those. Growing membership with a widening contributions gap means you are recruiting people who do not pay. A healthy pot with overdue loans means the money is not really there.

Report them to members, not just about them

The habit worth building: these reports are the basis of what the committee tells members. Sharing them regularly, in a form members can read, is what keeps a member organisation trusted through the year rather than defended at the annual meeting.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, run all four with some members lapsed, some contributions unpaid and a loan overdue. Then write the two sentences you would say to a committee — that exercise is the whole point of the reports.