Member Renewals and Duplicates

Sometimes members who want to renew will simply use the new member registration process to join again.

This leads to a situation where the billing system maintains their original record with an unpaid invoice and adds a new member record with an invoice and payment record.

When this happens, in most cases you want to drop the new record and manually record a payment against the original invoice record.

To avoid this situation, it is useful to:

• Send out periodic reminder email notifications (which will include a link for the member to renew online)
• Make a note on your website that the member registration is for NEW MEMBERS ONLY, and that renewing members can log-in and renew, or respond to an email renewal notification
• There is a feature called "Renewal-Email: Retrieval Feature" in Billing Configuration.  When turned on, it will display a note on member registration informing the user that this feature is for new members only, and that if they are a renewing member they can click a link to request a renewal email.  They will then receive a renewal notification via email, from which they can click the link and renew online.