Introduction
Memberships are a great fundraising tool and can further support the organization's mission by raising funds while providing donors with membership benefits or incentives. While Membership work in a similar way as Sustainers, memberships can be used as a tool to collection donations on a scheduled billing date and typically have annual dues and can be paid in full or over a period of time. If your organization is leveraging memberships as a fundraising tool, learn more below on how to create membership within CharityEngine.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
- Before creating membership records, you must create the membership types, if you have not already done so, read this article to help you get started.
Instructions

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- Rate: the rate at which the member will be billed (total final value)
- Active: defaults to yes
- Create Invoice: defaults to yes. upon completion of the membership record and click SAVE an invoice will be generated
- State Date: this is the starting date of the membership. Click on until to add an ending date
- Category: as this is a membership record, this will default to Membership
- Type: select the membership type to be applied
- Status: optional for organization preference
- Fund: optional, selection of Fund account
- GL Code: optional, selection of General Ledger Code to be applied
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- the Person, Organization, or Household to associate the membership.
- If no contacts are found, or if the contacts do not match, you can create a new contact record with the data entered.
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- Manual billing – please note all transactions and invoicing must be manually created and processed by a user within your organization. This also allows you to create a custom billing schedule after the membership record has been created. (Via the Invoice tab which will be created upon saving the record)
- Auto(matic) billing – selecting Auto will expose billing options including installment amounts, frequency and payment method. Note, please be sure to apply to all future invoices.
- Note: All payment method types can be used for automatic billing and a transaction will be created, however cash and checks will not process until they have been entered into the database.
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FAQs & Additional Reading
Q. I'm ready to start creating members, how do I establish our organization's membership types?
A. Before creating membership records, you must create the membership types, if you have not already done so, read this article to help you get started.
Q. I'm ready to start managing membership records and capture billing needs. Where do I get started?
A. Once you have created the new membership record, read this article to help you get started with management and billing.