Compucorp Membership Extras: Offline auto-renew questions

Question

We use Stripe and GoCardless for our online payments but we also have circa 400 offline annual direct debits that are collected by a bureau and were created prior to our CiviCRM implementation.

Historically, we've been doing a mass import each year in order to auto-renew these memberships as auto-renew for offline payment methods isn't natively supported by CiviCRM out of the box.

I've been investigating Compucorps 'Membership Extras' plugin and reading Jamie's blog post and this looks like it could really save us from having to do this mass imports each year.

I have a few questions about the plugin:

1. Does this plugin actually create a recuring contribution record the same way that online payments do?

I believe we have some CiviRules that use this field as part of the criteria for certain mail sending.

2. Is there any way to bulk apply this to our 400 existing direct debits before they auto-renew in April 2020?

3. The documentation states:

Membership Extras uses a built-in "offline payment plan" payment processor to support the offline handling of recurring payment plans. If you happen to have another offline payment processor (payment processor that uses Payment_Manual class) and you would like all payment plan created in the back office to use that payment processor instead, you will be able to make that change in the “Offline payment processor for back office” setting by going to Administer -> Payment Plan Settings.

We use two different payment processors for offline auto-renewals; a mix of "Legacy Direct Debit" and "Standing Order". Is there any way for auto-renewal to just use the same payment processor as the original contribution?

4. In some cases, a member has an existing direct debit or standing order that adds extra money as a donation on top of the annual membership fee. Historically, we split this into two imports:

In this example, the annual Direct Debit is actually for £46.

Is there any way to have the extension include the donation as part of the 'duplication' auto-renew process?

Thanks for a great plugin. Hoping it's able to solve some of our admin overhead!

Any suggestions or help greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Thanks for looking into membership extras. Just a quick point that we are planning a release at the end of Jan which will fix a lot of bugs and issues so I would suggest to wait till that is released before using this fully.

Answers to questions below:

1. Does this plugin actually create a recurring contribution record the same way that online payments do?

Yes it does - when creating a new membership you have the option to use a payment plan. If you do the system will create a recurring contribution.

2. Is there any way to bulk apply this to our 400 existing direct debits before they auto-renew in April 2020?

This is a bit more tricky. For existing memberships who do not have a recurring contribution you would need to set them up with recurring contributions linked to the contributions and memberships. Perhaps with 400 or so this would be best done manually by creating new memberships starting in the new period, but alternatively you could generate a script (or if you would like some developer support with this do get in touch with me at hell[email protected] and we can see if we can create this for you).

3. We use two different payment processors for offline auto-renewals; a mix of "Legacy Direct Debit" and "Standing Order". Is there any way for auto-renewal to just use the same payment processor as the original contribution?

Afraid not. The payment processor is what does all the clever work behind the scenes to create the payment plan and instalments. Note you also need to enable the renew memberships scheduled job. Why do you need to use the existing payment processors can I ask?

4. In some cases, a member has an existing direct debit or standing order that adds extra money as a donation on top of the annual membership fee. Historically, we split this into two imports: Is there any way to have the extension include the donation as part of the 'duplication' auto-renew process?

Yes... but again this is a bit tricky to update existing memberships into. For new memberships the extension completely supports line items so you could have a membership line (or two) + donation lines on a single contribution. These would then recur with the recurring contribution.

Hope the above is useful and do keep an eye out for the v2 release which will be a big update.

Best

Jamie

Answer 2

I wonder if using this extension might work instead?

https://github.com/adixon/ca.civicrm.contributionrecur

It provides a slightly more sophisticated off-line payment processor, as well as a job that will provide implicit membership renewals using the 'auto-membership' feature.

https://github.com/adixon/ca.civicrm.contributionrecur#auto-memberships