I
posted a question earlier and thought that my membership expiration dates were calculating wrong. However, I found that the system was actually designed this way when it was answered.
It appears that if the payment is made within the renewal window, it only gives the patron a year from their original expiration and doesn't give the customer credit for their membership from their new transaction date. This is a big problem for us.
For example, let's say my renewal window is 2 months before and 2 months after expiration. John Smith expired in December 2011 and then he comes to renew his membership at the end of February 2012. Once we renewed him in February, his new expiration is only December 2012. We have to manually fix this.
The customer then loses out on any membership benefits, discounts, and activities since he was lapsed for two months and only gets 10 more months of the membership when he technically paid for an entire year.
Is our organization the only one with this issue? We would like the membership to expire a year or one term from the new transaction date, and not the expiration date.
This is a big issue for us too. You can set the Renewal Window Ends to 0 months after expiration. This way anyone that renews after their membership expires will use the transaction date as the new expiration date.
The problem with this is all renewals after the membership has expired will be considered rejoins and not renewals. I'm not sure how this will affect your reporting but a lot of our members renew after their membership expires. So we want to group members that renew 0 to 6 months after they expire as renewals and after 6 months as rejoins. I wish there was another step in the renewal window to let us choose how to process the new expiration date.