Why Do Some Current Members Have Membership_End_Date Values That Are In The Past?

Why Do Some Current Members Have Membership_End_Date Values That Are In The Past?

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We're aware that for a small number of members the Membership_End_Date isn't being updated when their monthly payment is collected. This only affects members whose Membership_Status hasn't changed, and so you may come across members with a Membership_End_Date in the past, but a Membership_Status of Current. These will be corrected, and the Membership_Status should be considered correct. If in doubt, raise a support ticket.

You may occasionally find that a member's Activist Record shows some seemingly contradictory information around their Membership_Status. Specifically that they have a Membership_Status of Current, but their Membership_End_Date has come and gone. So, why does this happen and should you be concerned?

How The Membership_End_Date & Membership_Status Fields Are Determined

The Membership_Status and Membership_End_Date Field values are both affected by membership payments, but they behave in slightly different ways.
  1. When a successful payment is received, and the Member's outstanding balance is zero the Membership_Status field is set to Current.
  2. When a payment fails the Membership_Status Field is set to Grace, and the end date is set to the last date they were paid up until.
  3. When a payment is successful this updates the associated date fields- Membership_Period_Start and Membership_End_Date, based on their billing frequency. So for a monthly paying member, their Membership_End_Date will be set as Membership_Period_Start + one month.

So How Does This Explain Members With A Membership_Status Of Current But A Membership_End_Date In The Past?

The key to understanding this is understanding how Direct Debits work, how long the Direct Debit process takes, and what triggers will and won't happen during this period.

When a member pays by card the payment is completed almost instantly, meaning it can be recorded as successful or unsuccessful across all systems very quickly. This triggers any changes to the membership fields that are determined by payments statuses.

When a member pays by Direct Debit the time between an invoice being generated, and payment being received is just over a week. During this time we don't know if the payment has been successful or not, and therefore the fields aren't updated in the same way.

What's The Process That Happens For Direct Debit Paying Members?




  1. An Invoice is generated on the Member's renewal date.
  2. A Direct Debit request is made via our payment provider (Go-Cardless).
  3. The amount requested is debited from the Member's nominated bank account.
  4. The same amount is then deposited into GPEW's accounts.
  5. Once the payment has been determined successful by our payment provider the payment is marked as successful in Chargebee.
  6. Chargebee sends this payment information into Salesforce, which sets the Membership_Status to Current, and the Membership_End_Date and Membership_Period_Start.

I Still Don't Understand

The Membership_Status field is determined by the status of a payment- Successful or Failed. You can think of the payment status as the trigger that updates the Membership_Status and other membership fields. As the payment process doesn't complete straight away for Direct Debit payers the trigger doesn't happen. This means that just after a member's renewal date these fields won't be updated as there's no trigger and these fields will appear out of date. You should only encounter this for a maximum of ten days for a new Direct Debit instruction after a renewal date, and should consider the Membership_Status field the source of truth when considering the status of the member.