Recurring Billing is a great way to get your current members to pay early and completely automate your club’s bookkeeping. Imagine if 95% of your club simply signed up for an automatic payment plan. This could save your volunteer Treasurer days worth of work! 

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Get Your Members to Pay Early

What’s better than having your members pay online? Having them pay online early! Why not set up a prize drawing to incentivize people to pay early. How about, “Sign up for Recurring Billing by Feb 5 and get put into our prize drawing for five free movie tickets!” Or, “Sign up for Recurring Billing by Jan 10 and we will waive Paypal’s processing fees!”

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Keep up with Inflation

Let’s face it – at some point in the near future you will probably need to increase membership prices. Maybe your facilities are aging. Maybe your tennis courts need resurfacing. Maybe you need to hire extra lifeguards. Or maybe you just need to keep up with inflation.

People don’t like price increases. But they’re a necessary part of running a swim and tennis club, so your club needs to have a plan. Set a 10-year plan in place where dues are increased a small amount (say $10 a year) every year. Most people would rather pay $10 more each year than have their bill increase by $100 at some point. With a $10 annual increase, your club’s dues would only be $100 more in the span of 10 years.

When members sign up for Automatic Recurring Billing their dues won’t increase. The rate they sign up for is locked in. So then how does that help keep up with inflation?  

What you’re doing is establishing a pattern that every year anyone NOT on Recurring Billing will see their dues increase. So this incentivizes signing up for an automatic plan.

Your club can cancel a member’s Automatic Billing at any time.  After a few year’s you might decide a member’s locked in rate is too far out of line with the current year’s rate. That member has obviously saved money for a few years, so they will most likely want to sign back up for an automatic plan.

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Automate Your Bookkeeping

With Recurring Billing you take all the bookkeeping burden off your club’s volunteer Treasurer. With a Pool Dues site your Board admins can keep track of payments. In fact, Board admins can easily see which members have signed up for recurring payments, which members haven’t paid, which memberships are expired, and a number of other data points about payments and membership tiers.

Below is a “heat map” style breakdown of memberships. In your Pool Dues dashboard this is found under Membership > Current Standings by Date. You can even change the date of this query to show standings in the future…

We highlight rows by membership type and flag potential issues in the future. For example, a pink row indicates someone that signed up during the previous Summer.  Now most likely, this member will have paid again before that date (because the mass-invoicing system will notice they need to pay). But this gives you a bird’s eye view of all your standings in relation to when member’s paid the year before.

And as you can see, a light green row indicates a member is on a recurring plan. Your Treasurer can pretty much ignore these members. The only time where they would get flagged is if we detected their membership did not rebill. In which case, their row would turn red. Before that, your Treasurer would also have gotten an email notification that their recurring billing did not occur.

 

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Listen, it’s the 21st century. We’ll say this until we’re blue in the face – people want to pay for things online. They want the ease of automatic payments not a paper invoice in their mailbox. Get set up with Recurring Billing with Pool Dues and make your life easier!