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Need help calculating membership status

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    #1

    Need help calculating membership status

    I need help calculating a Membership Status (character field) based on the following:

    The organization requires all its established members to renew their memberships every year between August 1 - Sept 30 or their memberships are "dropped."

    Membership status will either be "CURRENT" or "DROPPED 20xx" (where the xx is the year i.e. DROPPED 2003, next year it will be DROPPED 2004, etc.)

    "CURRENT" members are those who JOINED for the FIRST TIME on or after August 1 AND those who RENEW between August 1 and Sept. 30.

    "DROPPED 2003" members are those who joined after August 1 of the PREVIOUS year who fail to renew their memberships between August 1 and Sept. 30.

    Members who are dropped are given from October 1 - December 31 to Reinstate. The status of those who reinstate changes from "DROPPED 2003" to "CURRENT" again.

    I need some major advice from you A5 pros on how you would handle the database design and calculations so that the "Membership Status" field will reflects the correct status of "CURRENT" or "DROPPEd 20xx".

    Thanks!
    Tags: None
    #2
    RE: Need help calculating membership status

    Charlain,

    I would simply use a logical field with the default of NO. If the member is current, then tic it to YES.

    I'm not sure you could write code to evaluate the date field because a new member could join during any month during the year. You would still need a field to evaluate current or dropped.

    kenn
    TYVM :) kenn

    Knowing what you can achieve will not become reality until you imagine and explore.

    Comment

      #3
      RE: Need help calculating membership status

      This how I might set it up...

      1. Have a Customer table of name and adress data, with a "status" field and a "Member Since" date field for when they are first members. If they lapse in membership, then want to restart a lapsed membership say 2 years later, you have the option to update this field or start a fresh customer record.

      2. Have a Dues table to track individual dues transactions. As the dues are posted have a posting rule update the Customer status field appropriately.

      3. Run an operation at the end of the renewal period to set the customer "status" field to "DROPPED" by looking at the date of Dues table.

      Comment

        #4
        RE: Need help calculating membership status

        Hello Charlain,

        The sounds strangely like a routine I just did for another Alpha user. Hope I'm not stepping on someones toes.

        You left out a crucial piece of the puzzle, how is the record changed when someone joins/renews? I would think that the way to approach this would be to date stamp when a person renews/pays, then calculate off this. Unless there are more twists and turns to this (there always is :-), it should be fairly straight forward to build an expression that uses the paid date to return the "Current" or "Dropped 20xx" string.

        Are you saying that a person cannot renew after December?

        Good luck,
        Jim

        Comment

          #5
          RE: Need help calculating membership status

          Thanks for all the help, guys.

          Stephen--the suggestion you made about running an operation at the end of the renewal period is very similar to how I had this routine set up on my old Q&A DOS database -- except I would run the routine at the beginning of the renewal period and change everyone that was "current" to "Dropped 20xx". Then the status would update to current whenever the member renewed. I guess this would also work with A5, but I was hoping for a more "intuitive" way of doing this with A5.

          Jim--a member can re-join after December 30, but they can't technically "renew." Rejoining costs more -- but as far as the database goes, it could be handled similar to a renewal -- the user would just charge the member more when they get to the receipt routine. By "handled similar" I mean the date in a "Date Last Renewed" date could be updated for renewals, reinstatements and re-joinings :) and this "Date Last Renewed" would be the date used in calculating whether or not the member is "current".

          Now, I just have to figure out how to program the status field to analyze the "Date Joined" and "Date Last Renewed" field to determine whether or not the member is current or dropped. I haven't done any date calculations yet with A5 -- wish me luck!

          Thanks again for the help Ken, Stephen & Jim! If you have any more ideas/suggestions/code for me -- please let me know!

          Comment

            #6
            RE: Need help calculating membership status

            Jim,

            I believe what he's saying is that a person could join any time of the year but the renewal period is from Aug 1 through Sept 30. Not a big problem to key off the months of Aug and Sept but then he also has to catch a new member which might join during the other 10 months.

            The problem with a date stamp field is that you now have to account for a year change and while someone might renew during the renewal period, someone else might join after the first of the year, thus you're working with 2 years (say '03 and '04) during the current membership year.

            I vote for the logical field, one click and it's done and not much of an expression to malfunction, just a simple if/then.

            kenn
            TYVM :) kenn

            Knowing what you can achieve will not become reality until you imagine and explore.

            Comment

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