Nik

Hi Oguz

Agh… I’ve spotted another problem with this. Here WAS my plan ie.

Two memberships –
Membership A: 1st May 2018 – 30th April 2019
Membership B: 1st May 2019 – 30th April 2020

One week prior to expiry, members get email to go and sign-up for next year’s membership.

ie. pretty much as you suggested but omitting the recurring option as it doesn’t work the way we need it to.

BUT… I’ve noticed that when a member signs up for a new membership, they automatically lose their existing membership which means that if a member on Membership A signs up for B before 30th April 2019, they will lose the membership which runs until 30th April 2019 and effectively be locked out until the Membership B starts on 1st May 2019!

Alternatively, if we don’t prompt them until after Membership A expires… there’s a good chance they will get locked out if/until they DO pay (which is hardly fair as it gives them no chance to pay before their membership expires).

Losing other memberships when signing up to a new one also causes another serious with our Premium members to whom we’ve we’ve currently assigned Membership A plus an additional Premium Membership (which runs indefinitely and gives them additional access)… yet when they sign up for Membership B, they lose both Membership A AND their Premium Membership!

Surely this can’t be right? It’s possible to assign multiple memberships in the back-end so why does the front-end assume they want only ONE membership type at a time? (Incidentally, I note that the Memberships page shows other memberships with the option to “Change” rather than “Add” so maybe this is part of the problem, although I’ve also tested sending a user a direct link to the second membership ie. bypassing the Memberships page and the system still removes any existing memberships when they sign up to a new one, so it’s clearly not the whole answer).

I just cannot believe such a simple requirement is so difficult to achieve.

Regards
Nik

Thank you Oguz although I am really disappointed to hear this.

My requirements are really very basic ie.

I have some 200 existing members who are signed up to an annual membership which runs from 1st May one year to 30th April the following year, and will then have the option to renew for the next year (again running 1st May to 30th April).

Are you really telling me the only way to achieve this is to sign them all up for a membership which will run until 30th April 2019 (and issue them all an invoice individually)… then on 1st May 2019 I have to issue them all another invoice individually?

If that’s the case, I really don’t see a practical way of using your plug-in and will have to look for an alternative. If you had better documentation, perhaps I would have been able to work this out sooner – as it is, I’ve wasted months of trying to figure out what is/isn’t possible only to find that what I can only imagine is a very common and basic requirement can’t be fulfilled.

I’m very disappointed to say the least.

Regards
Nik

Hi Oguz

If you change settings like Dimitris suggested yes it can change membership automatically but can’t create an invoice for new membership. Also, it’s sending “Subscription – Completed with payment” email.

Thank you but… this makes no sense… didn’t you just say in your previous message that the “Subscription – Completed with payment” email INCLUDES an invoice link?

Regards
Nik

Thank you Dimitris. That’s quite close to what I’d decided to do anyway. When they get switched to the new membership at the expiry of the old one, will an invoice automatically be generated for the new membership? And which email notification should I use to send them to a link where they can make their payment?

Warm regards
Nik

PS. Also is there any way of making your recurring membership run fro 365 days instead of 366 ie. one year seems to run from 1st May 2018 to 1st May 2019, which means the next year will start on 2nd May, rather than 1st May each year?

Hi Oguz

Thank you for getting back to me so promptly and yes I can see I can do it that way.

It used to be possible to do it simply by hovering over an invoice in the Billing page and the option “Mark as Paid” appeared, which was really useful and much quicker than having to open each invoice separately. Is that no longer possible?

Also is there ANY way of adding a group of users to a specific membership AND generating an invoice for them all at the same time, without doing it separately for each user? (I have over 200 users and as far as I can see, the only way is either to add them individually to a membership and create an invoice at the same time OR add them in bulk to a membership, but then I still have to create the invoices individually).

Regards
Nik

Thank again for your reply Dimitris.

I’d rather advise you to use the automatic recurring payments though, via PayPal Standard Gateway and of course the “before expire” emails, so your members know that the automatic payment will be triggered soon.

I agree… for those members who are willing to set up recurring payments that looks as if it could work well, but some of our members prefer to pay by one-off PayPal or by sending us a bank payment/cheque (ie. manual) and as far as I can see, the only option for them is to wait until their membership expires and then pay the invoice that gets generated upon expiry. This is really not ideal as it means that if my understanding is correct and they don’t pay immediately, they’ll be excluded from the site until they do?

I see I can set a “grace period” but at what point during that time does the invoice get generated eg. let’s say the membership is due to expire on 31st March and I set a grace period of 30 days… will the invoice be generated on 31st March or 30 days later?

In case it isn’t clear, what I really want is for members (paying by manual or single payments) to be issued an invoice (on the expiry date) which they have 30 days to pay before getting excluded from the site. This really doesn’t seem like an unusual or complicated requirement but I can’t for the life of me see how to achieve. Do you have any suggestions at all?

With many thanks in advance and hoping.
Nik

Hi Dimitris

Many thanks for getting back to me.

Next invoice is being created actually by the time previous invoice/subscription is paid, so in your case this will be happening one year before. Member can pay for that at any time, before expiration.

I’m sure I must be misunderstanding this!

Example: I have a member who signs up for annual membership today. He gets an invoice for 2018-2019 which he obviously pays to get access to the site. If he looks at his account details, the invoice shows as paid, but there’s certainly no sign of an invoice for 2019-2018 (and to be honest, it would be quite strange if there was.)

I’ve also checked the database (as far as I can), I certainly can’t see a draft invoice or anything waiting to be issued so there’s no way he could “pay for that at any time” as you say.

My question is therefore, at what point does that invoice actually become “available” ie. when is it generated? Is it at whatever date the reminder is sent out perhaps?

You can forward them to a custom page with their own invoice, using the
[ms-invoice] shortcode, but this would need some custom coding to get the proper invoice ID per member and subscription.

This sounds like a good plan and I’ve tested by creating a “One day” membership so that I can see when the reminder gets sent out including the [ms-invoice] shortcode, however, this seems to link to the previous (paid) invoice not the new one that they need to pay. Is this perhaps because it’s only a one day membership and therefore it’s causing some confusion, or does this relate to the custom coding you mention and if so, can you give me any pointers as to how I go about this? (When live, I will only have one subscription/membership level.)

In addition, when does the word “Renew” appear anywhere? Is that only AFTER a membership has actually expired?

Also it seems that I can’t get the [renewform] shortcode to work. I’m not quite sure what that should generate, but it sounds as if it might be useful and what I’m looking for.

With many thanks again. I really like your plug-in but damn it’s tricky to figure out. I guess that’s because it’s actually quite sophisticted once one can actually get the settings right 😉

Hi Oguz… or anyone who can help.

Is there any update to this yet? I can’t upgrade to version 4.1.2 until it’s fixed.

I’ve even tried comparing the two versions (4.1.1 and 4.1.2) myself but there are a lot of changes and it’s hard to see where the problem could be occuring.

Just to re-iterate, error messages are no longer being shown on the registration page eg. if the user name is left blank, instead of showing “Please enter a username”, the sign up fails and a red/pink bar appears over the user name field but no actual error message is displayed.

You’ve identified this as an issue yourself. After 5 weeks, is there any chance of a hotfix (if not a full update)? It’s quite a major issue for most people I would think.

With many thanks in advance and here’s hoping…