Membership, grades and transfers

Unlimited grades and categories: student, affiliate, associate, member, fellow, chartered, registrant, retired, honorary and life. Each carries its own rate, its own entitlements, its own designatory letters and its own eligibility rules. Grades can be sequenced so progression is understood by the system, with the rules for each step held against the grade rather than in a document somebody has to read. A member can hold more than one category where that is genuinely the case, rather than being forced into whichever single value fits worst.

A transfer between grades recalculates the subscription for the period remaining, reissues the invoice, and updates entitlements, register listing and designatory letters in the same move. Mid-year transfers are the normal case rather than an exception to be handled by hand. Pro-rata runs against configured periods rather than daily apportionment, banded in the way most bodies actually charge, which is the difference between a figure a member accepts and one somebody has to talk them through.

Joint membership means two members sharing a subscription with one of them invoiced, so the payment is single and the records stay separate. Organisational and corporate membership works the other way round: the organisation holds the membership, seats are allocated to named individuals, and the invoice goes to the organisation rather than to any member. Seats can be reassigned when people change jobs without the membership lapsing, which is the case that catches out any system treating a membership as belonging to a person.

Concessionary, hardship, career break, non-practising, retired and student-progression rates, each with its own eligibility and its own review point. The important part is that a concession can be time-boxed. It expires and prompts somebody to look at it again rather than persisting unnoticed for years, which is how organisations end up with members paying a student rate a decade after graduating and nobody quite willing to raise it.

For bodies that hold a public register, the register is a view of membership state rather than a separate list to maintain. Status, grade, designatory letters and practising status all follow the CRM record, and the public listing follows them. Nobody edits a page when a member transfers grade, and nobody has to remember to remove somebody who has lapsed, which is the failure that gets noticed publicly rather than internally.