For membership levels that use a specific renewal date – rather than the join date – you can prorate or adjust the membership fee when members join part-way through the membership period. Instead of charging members the full membership fee for an abbreviated membership period, you can charge a reduced fee, or charge the full fee and extend the membership into the next renewal period.
For example, if your annual membership fee is $120 and your memberships renew on January 1st, and someone joins on June 10th, Wild Apricot can automatically adjust their membership fee to $70. Alternately, you choose to charge the full fee and extend the membership through to the end of the next year.
You can also choose whether to prorate extra membership costs.
There is no prorating when a member changes their membership level. The full price of the new membership term will be billed, and the next renewal date will be calculated based on new level settings and payment date.
Applying prorating to membership levels
To apply automatic prorating, a membership level must use a specific date for their Renewal period. If the level has recurring payments enabled, prorating can only be applied if you're using Wild Apricot Payments (AffiniPay), Authorize.Net, or Stripe as your payment system.
To active prorating for a membership level, click the New applications tab within the membership level details.
The following prorating options are available:
Automatically prorate fee/selected costs
Check this option if you want membership fees to be prorated based on the application date.
With this option enabled, you can choose when the prorating will be applied. You can choose to apply prorating only so many days or months before an annual renewal, and only so many days before a monthly renewal. For example, if you enable prorating and set it to 7 months, and your membership period begins on January 1st, then only those applications received on or after June 1st (7 months before January 1st) will be prorated. Applications received before June 1st will not be pro-rated.
The prorating calculation will divide the membership fee for annual renewals by 12 then multiply the result by the number of months left in your membership period. For example, if your level renews on January 1st and your annual membership fee is $120, then an application received on September 1st will be charged a prorated fee of $40 (120/12*4).
The current month will count as a full month in the prorating calculation regardless of what day of the month the application was received. Using the above example, a prorated charge of $40 will be applied whether the application was received on September 1st, September 15th, or September 30th.
Charge full regular fee AND extend renewal by one additional period
If you enable this option, then any new application submitted in this time frame will pay the full membership fee, but they will not have to renew their membership until the next period after the current one. You can set this time frame using either days or months for annual renewals, and just days for monthly renewals. For example, if you enable this option and set it to 30 days, and your membership period begins on January 1st, then applications received beginning on December 1st – 30 days before January 1 – will be charged the full membership fee but extended to the end of the following year. Applications received between January 1st and December 1st will not be extended.
Prorating examples
Here are a couple of examples to help explain how the prorating settings work.
Automatically prorate fees
| Membership level details | Application date | Next renewal date | Calculation |
|---|---|---|---|
Renewal period: Annual, Specific date: July 1st | January 1st, 2015 | July 1st, 2016 | $120/12 x 6=$60 |
Renewal period: Every 3 years, Specific date: July 1st | January 1st, 2015 | July 1st, 2018 | $360/36 x 30=$300 |
Charge full fee and extend renewal
Assumption: application has been submitted within the specified date window before the renewal date.
| Membership level details | Application date | Normal renewal date | Extended renewal date |
|---|---|---|---|
Renewal period: Annual, Specific date: July 1st | January 1st, 2015 | July 1st, 2016 | July 1st, 2017 |
Renewal period: Every 3 years, Specific date: July 1st | January 1st, 2015 | July 1st, 2018 | July 1st, 2021 |
Prorating extra cost fields
For each extra membership cost field, you can define whether it should be prorated as well.
For example, if new members can get a branded t-shirt with their membership, you probably wouldn't want to pro-rate that cost, since they'd get the t-shirt whether their first membership period is full 12 months or just 7 months. On the other hand, if you use an extra cost field for monthly newsletters, you might want to prorate the fee.
Prorating on the membership application form
When applying for a membership level whose fee or extra cost is being prorated, the applicant is notified of the prorated cost when selecting their level, as well as on each screen of the application process.
Prorating on invoices and receipts
Application fees and costs which have been prorated are shown on the invoice.
There will be a line which details the full fee or extra cost, and then a line where this is prorated via a discount.
There is an outside chance that the prorating might lead to a fee that is zero, or so close to it as to essentially be free. Please note that to avoid this and the complications that can arise from it, all prorated amounts are always rounded up to 0.01.
Manually adding a member to a prorated level
If a membership level has a prorating period set up and the administrator either:
- Creates a member for that level, or
- Changes a member's membership level and sets their status to Pending-New
The following will happen:
- The application will be pro-rated according to the rules that have been defined (but selected extra charges will not be pro-rated).
- There will be no "Prorated" label applied to this transaction on the Transaction list.
The Charge full regular fee AND extend renewal by one additional period setting will work as described if the renewal date is left empty. After changing status from Pending-New to Active renewal date will be set to the next period.
