What is Membership Extras?
Membership Extras is designed to be a companion extension for organisations that use CiviCRM for membership. It provides comprehensive functionality to support payment in instalments and order management. There are also several companion extensions for Drupal that support complex self service renewal and upgrade management via webforms. For more information see the blog post here:
What does Membership Extras currently do?
Membership fee in Instalments
Whilst CiviCRM allows you to have memberships that can have different durations (eg. monthly, annual, lifetime) CiviCRM doesn’t support actual payment by instalments. This is where an organisation will want to offer a membership that has a different duration to the payment duration. For example an annual membership that is paid in monthly or quarterly instalments. With Membership Extra’s you can!
Pro-rata calculations for fixed memberships
Membership extras automatically helps to calculate both the correct number of instalments and also the correct fee amount for fixed memberships (i.e. memberships with a defined start and end date), making it easy for administrators to add memberships part way through the period with the correct rates. You can also configure the system to skip the pro-rata calculation if preferred.
Manage upgrades and add-ons gracefully
This will allow administrators to modify a members membership types as an order, during the current membership period - upgrading, downgrading or adding add-ons as needed.
These will all flow through as part of the same billing order as the previous membership - i.e. as part of the same recurring contribution and hence will all be kept on the same invoice. The system automatically updates future invoices (contributions) with the correct amounts based on the updated cost of the new membership types.
This will lower transaction costs for organisations and tidy up billing processes.
Memberships in arrears
CiviCRM’s default handling of members being in “arrears” only supports a few use cases (specifically where members either do not renew at all) or where they do not pay before a grace period elapses. In order to really support payment by instalments we have extended the membership status rules, to also be able to change the status of a membership when a payment relating to the membership is overdue, so you can track members in arrears (and email them automatically!) before finally ending their membership benefits. You can do this by creating a new membership status rule based on a trigger "membership is in arrears".
Offline auto-renewal and Direct Debit
CiviCRM has support for many payment processors, including several Direct Debit payment processors. With these “online” payment processors, when the membership comes to renew, the logic is actually managed by the payment processor in order to renew the membership and take next years payment.
CiviCRM doesn’t (out of the box) however have any functionality for memberships to renew when there is not a payment processor automating the process. This might be useful, for example, for corporate memberships where you want the membership to renew automatically and have an invoice automatically sent to the organisation, that they can then pay online. With Membership extras CiviCRM now fully supports offline automated renewal including sending email notifications with invoices for payment.
By installing the companion Direct Debit for Membership Extras you can also manage manual batch Direct Debit payment processing.
With CiviPlus (see below) there is also full integration with the GoCardless payment processor.
Automated upgrades at renewal "Autorenewal rules"
Membership extras also includes amazing functionality to automatically upgrade members at the time of renewal. This may be useful when, for example, you need students to automatically upgrade to full membership after a certain period of time. The rules include support for smart groups to allow complete flexibility to support your processes.
INTEGRATES with:
Direct Debit for Membership Extras- a companion CiviCRM extension that allows organisations to follow standard auddis processes for direct debit.
Webform CiviCRM Membership Extras - a companion Drupal module that brings Drupal webform support for all the extra membership functionality the extension provides. If you are using Drupal and you would like to use Membership Extras to have memberships with instalments created by Webform CiviCRM, you can simply download and install the companion Drupal module and your all set!
Webform Direct Debit for Membership Extras - a companion Drupal module that brings the webform support for the Direct Debit extension.
How do I get Membership Extras?
Due to the complex nature of Membership Extras it is designed and tested to work with a specific and patched version of CiviCRM that Compuco host via our Github. Using Membership Extras with an earlier or newer version of CiviCRM may lead to unexpected issues.
In the extension info.xml file, see the “comments” field where we specify the currently supported version of CiviCRM and have a download link to the correct version: See here. Currently this is a patched version of CiviCRM 5.51.3, which can be found here: https://github.com/compucorp/civicrm-core/releases
This patched version maybe earlier than the latest version of CiviCRM but includes all security patches.
Other ways to get membership extras?
The easiest way to get membership extras is via the Compuco hosted version of CiviCRM: CiviPlus.
CiviPlus brings together all the very best features of the amazing CiviCRM platform from all around the community and combines it with our Compuco know-how to give you the best possible CiviCRM experience. Migrating to CiviPlus is easy using our automated CiviCRM migration tool.
With enterprise grade hosting, scalability and security, CiviPlus will support your organisation to grow and thrive safe in the knowledge that we have you covered.
CiviPlus is CiviCRM plus a whole lot more.
