membership_fee way of working

[pboosten]

Dear team,

I've been using the membership_fee for some time now, in a fairly easy setup:

all our members are in one role (called 'member'), and they pay an annual fee of 100 euros (actually 111, carnival-related, but I'll keep it simple here). In the role-settings the fee is filled, and the period. Whenever a new member is added, I use the 'recalculate' to update the fields for the contact.

So far so good. Now there's one member who wants to pay for two others, so I figured I created a family role for that:
prefix: family3 (with fee set to 300 and period to annual)
role name: family3 <some name>
updated the role settings to have a fee of 300 euros, set the period to annual.
added the three members, promoted the one who's going to pay to 'leader' [1]
ran 'options' -> 'update family roles', which gave no errors.

However, they were still in the members role as well, so I removed them from that role, and deleted the fee-value (of 100 euros, filled by the 'recalculate' previously).

[1] it's ambigious in the documentation what's meant by 'the first member found in the database': is this the contact with the lowest id in the table, or is this alphabetically?

What happens next?
Do I have to 'recalculate' the family role as well? That probably will update the fee field in the contact to 300 for all of them, which might not be desirable.
UPDATE: I just ran 'recalculate' on all roles, and I can comfirm that the contact designated as payer (in my case the leader of the role) gets updated with the correct value (in my case 300 euros AKA 333 euros).

Do I have to remove them from the original member role like I did? We accept a maximum number of members and this was set in the role, however moving members to another role will break this functionality.

Removing them from the members role also 'broke' the payment analysis, since we now see three payments less in that overview. For now I think this is because payments already were done (we ask them to pay before November 11th for the upcoming year, again a carnival-thing).

I would have done this in German, but it simply was too much to explain.

Thanks in advance for any answers.

[rmb]

Hi Peter,

what's meant by 'the first member found in the database'
This refers to the contact with the smallest ID.
I've assumed the following scenario:

• You add an entire family to Admidio.
• First, the 9-month-old baby, then his older brother (2 years old), then the mother, and finally the father.
• Then, you create a family role for membership fee.
• For fee calculation, membership fee needs a family member to whom it assigns all fees (section fees, additional fees, etc.).
• If no leader is designated and no account details are entered for any family member, to whom should the fees be assigned?
• The plugin goes through the database and finds the baby (9 months old) as the first member of this family. All fees are then assigned to this baby.
• If you then want to create an invoice, it will be sent to the baby: very inconvenient.
• There is an option to designate a leader for this purpose.

Do I have to 'recalculate' the family role as well?
No.
When recalculating, the €300 will only be allocated to the leader (or the person whose bank details are registered). No contribution will be charged to the other family members (in your case, the other two).

Do I have to remove them from the original member role like I did?
You did the right thing.

What could be done differently:

• I would only use the 'member' role for Admidio's members ( = contacts). For membership fees, I would use separate roles.
• Something like: 'Individual payer' and 'Family payer'
• Individual payer includes everyone who pays only themselves, while family payer includes everyone who is part of a family. The total number of members in these two roles must equal the number of members in the 'member' role.

rmb

[pboosten]

Hallo rmb,

Danke für die ausführige Antwort.

Alles klar jetzt.