Running a member organisation well

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

The last lesson in the catalogue, and the one least about software.

The yearly rhythm

Renewals. Watch what is lapsing and ask before it does. A membership renewed in the last week of its term is routine; one renewed three months after lapsing is a recruitment.

Contributions. Set deadlines you will act on, then act on them early and lightly.

The fund. Review pool and loans at every committee meeting, and put the position in front of members regularly.

The register. Archive members who have genuinely gone, keep everyone else. Membership history is one of the more valuable things an organisation owns.

Controls are not distrust

In an ordinary business, second-person approval protects the owner from mistakes. In a member organisation it protects the person doing the work — from suspicion, from an accusation years later, and from the position of being the only one who knows.

A treasurer who insists every fund movement is approved by someone else is not being bureaucratic. They are declining to be the only person who could have done it, which is a reasonable thing to want when the money belongs to your neighbours.

Turn on approvals for the fund. Keep the audit trail. Never delete.

Never share a login

Said in Essentials and it matters more here. Every action is attributed to whoever is signed in. A treasurer using the chairperson’s login has made the record wrong in exactly the place the record most needs to be right.

What software cannot do

FeePrime records what happened and shows the position accurately. It will not make a member pay, decide whether to lend to somebody in difficulty, or repair trust once it is damaged.

What it does is remove the excuse of not knowing — no reconstructed figures, no arguments about what was agreed, no position that only one person can explain.

You have finished the catalogue

That is Members & Membership, and the last of the eight courses.

Between them you have covered the ideas that repeat everywhere in FeePrime — records and modules, approval and audit, archiving rather than deleting, quantities belonging to places — and then each part of a working organisation: the public site, the catalogue, selling, buying, stock, money, and members.

If you took Essentials and one other, that was the right amount. Come back for the next one when your job changes.

Keep staging.feeprime.com for anything you want to try before you do it for real.