Making Fees vary depending on Membership Status

NeatClubs allows you to present up to three additional fees or discounts and have the fees vary depending on whether the person registering is a member or not or has prior registrations within a specific time period.

There are two ways to determine whether someone is a member on registration.

a) Check the database of a supported governing body programmatically

b) Check the  local NeatClubs.COM database to see if there is a recent registration for this member.

The setup screen for the supplementary fees (found under payment options in the event setup) is shown below:

Set the supplementary fee to active:  The fields for a supplementary discount or uplift will not appear unless this value is set to "Yes".  If Yes, the following values associated with the discount or uplift will be considered.  Only the first Supplementary Fee or Discount is shown here, but up to three can be configured.

Set the amount for the supplementary fee: This field defines the amount of a supplementary fee or discount.  If it is a discount, it should be preceded by a minus sign (-20).  Do not enter a dollar sign or percent sign in this field - enter only an integer or a real number.

Set the mode determine how the supplementary fee is expressed: A supplementary fee can be expressed in either dollar terms or percentage terms.  The discounts are uplifts are determined based on the "baseline" price only. Click here for an explanation of the various components of fees in NeatClubs.

Enter text that will describe supplementary fee "X" to web-site visitors: This is text that you can add that will explain your discount or uplift policy to we-bsite  visitors.  It will appear automatically on the screen where the fees are presented. As an example, "We are required to provide a $20.00 fee to cover the cost of insurance.  Fees must be paid one per year calendar year."

Allow users to self-select whether supplementary fee #1 applies: As we'll see below, the determination of whether a fee applies can optionally be based on whether there are prior registrations for the person being registered, or whether they exist in an external database operated by a governing body.  NeatClubs will make a determination on its own as to whether or not a fee applies based on the policies provided.  Below is an example where we are allowing a user to self-select or over-ride the decision made by the system.

Set the initial state of the fee X checkbox to "checked":  Research has shown that the default state of an item on a form will most often be accepted by web-site users.  If you are presenting a fee or discount, and not making the value conditional on whether a member exists in a local or remote database, you can control the default value here of whether the fee or discount is assumed to apply.

Fee/Discount depends on whether recent registrations are found in the local database: Often clubs will want to charge an additional registration fee only of prior registrations have not been received within a particular time period.  If this value is "yes", the fee will be charged or not charged based on whether a registration for the same user is found in the database within some period of time.

** Please note: Validating against the local NeatClubs.COM database for prior registrations required that the web-site be operating with Club Management Features enabled. Please review the section on Club Management Features for more information.

Check local database for registrations more recent than: This option is directly related to the option above. if the option above is set to "No" this option does nothing.  If Fees or Discounts are conditional on prior registrations existing in the local database, the date entered here specifies the date after which registrations will be checked for a matching entry.   As a specific example, let's assume that our fiscal year starts July 1st, but we open registrations for our summer programs start May 1st. We assume that a $20.00 fee is owing for the fiscal year.  We can assume that if another registration is found having been received since May 1st, the user has already paid an annual fee, and therefore we can avoid asking them for payment again.

Fee/Discount conditional on member status in an external database: This option is mutually exclusive to the Fee/Discount Conditional on Local Database described above.  If this value is set to "Yes", during the registration NeatClubs will consult an external governing bodies database to see if a record for the member exists.  Governing bodies support by NeatClubs are configured under System Setup --> Preferences --> External Systems.

Fee/Discount conditional on member status mode: This option determines whether there is a positive or negative correlation between whether a member is found in a local or remote database, and whether a fee applies. If set to "Yes", the correlations is "positive" and the fee or discount will apply only if a matching member record is found.  If set to "No", the correlation will be negative - this in mode of operation, the fee or discount will be applied only if a match is not found.

Example 1: We are a club in British Columbia and are validating against the Integrated Sports Solutions central GBC database.  We wish to charge an additional $25.00 fee if someone is not found in this database.  In this case the settings would be:

Example 2: We are a club in Ontario and are validating against our own local database because we are operating in club management mode and have all of our on-line and manual registrations present in NeatClubs.  We wish to charge an an additional annual fee of $25.00 only if we don't already have a registration for that member made since May 1st of the current year.  If we have registrations made after this date, we can assume that the membership fee was paid on the first registration.  In this case the settings would be: