Member Counts

Susan Aronstam

For those of you who have a membership base, when do you do your counts? The first of the month, end of the month, middle?

Are there any other protocols you follow when doing counts?

 

Daniel Noga 2

Here at our Museum, our staff Accountant keeps tabs on memberships at least weekly. This may be because we are in the midst of cleaning up our membership data, though.



In my first position using RE: at a totally membership-based organization, we ran membership reports as part of our month-end procedures. We would report on new members, expired members and renewing members. This suited the organization because we had a policy of setting expiration dates to the last day of the month in question, regardless of what date the payment was made. As such, all lapsed memberships would register at month-end anyhow, so it just made sense.



In addition to that, with that particular organization being the North American section of an international organization, we would report the same stats to the International HQ on a monthly as well as an annual basis. The monthly reports required only loose counts, whereas the annual reports had to include all details--names, join dates, membership levels, expiration dates, etc.