Chasing down late payments

Offering online payments to your members is terrific. Chasing up those who haven't paid is annoying. It doesn't have to be. Below are a few ways you can use the reports and communicator systems to your advantage in hounding those disobedient unpaid members.

Using Reports
The reporting system within your database is a particularly powerful tool and when used effectively, will provide you with endless ways to slice and dice your data. Crucially, the capability of running all manner of reports extends to all online registration and payments transactions that take place through your database.

To get a quick and easy glance at the members that have registered into the current season without purchasing a product you will be able to run a one-click report as below (this can be found in the Finance section of the Reports system).

To get a more detailed look at your members transactions run the Transactions report in the Finance section. Below is an example of the fields that you could use to generate a report to show all members in the current season with an 'unpaid' transaction record. The key element here are the filters that will filter out the results for 'unpaid' and '2013' records.

Once you've generated this report and are happy with it, the best thing to do is to save it. For more information on saving reports click here. Saving the report serves two functions. The first that you can come back and re-run the report at any time without clicking and dragging the fields across, the second, and key to the purposes of this article, is that you can utilise the list of unpaid members through the Communicator menu (described below) to send them a direct email or SMS.

Using Communicator

As described above, communicator can be used to directly communicate to a group of your members, in this case, unpaid members. In the Communications menu click on Send a Message and Saved Report to go through and send either an SMS or Email directly to your unpaid members.

There is some further information on using Communicator here.

This process is a really efficient way to target specific members and can be repeated as often as you like. It will just depend on how much you'd like to pester your members!