Improvements and Optimisation
Whilst you have been working hard to maintain your organisation run’s smoothly, we have been doing the same behind the scenes at Pay Subs Online to add some new swanky features to our membership software (many of which were requested by you and we have delivered!) Here’s what we have added;
Mobile responsive member login pages
You asked for it – you got it! The members’ online account is now mobile ‘responsive’, making navigation when accessed via a mobile phone more user-friendly. Here’s how it looks:
Members detail page (this is where they keep their info up-to-date)
Payment page (where they can view what’s outstanding, review paid items and pay for any optional extras):
Tapping the ‘Extras’ link displays any optional extras (which you can amend the description for using our new functionality under ‘Admin’ > ‘Settings’ – see info further down this page):
Events page where people can register for upcoming events;
Individual URL’s for registration pages
Currently, we show all registration options in the drop-down on the registration page. However, it might be that you want to link to the individual options within that dropdown:
So, for example, if you have multiple membership categories or classes and you want to link to the specific registration form from your website, social media accounts or email, you now can by using a unique URL that we generate for each. You can access these URLs by going to ‘Admin’ > ‘Settings’ and scrolling down to the navigation section:
This will then take you to the screen below;
New GoCardless Integration
GoCardless recently changed the way in which their partners (like PaySubsOnline.com) connect to their system. We’ve spent over 250 hours (thanks for that GoCardless!) reconfiguring the integration of our membership software to work with their new API. One tangible benefit of the change is your members are now able to make subsequent payments without the need to re-input their bank details.
They also made a change to the button people use to confirm their payment. They changed the wording from ‘Confirm’ to ‘Setup a direct debit’. Though direct debits can be used to make single payments, many people relate ‘Direct Debit’ to recurring payments. With this in mind, we have created logic that displays a pop-up box on the check-out page so if a person is making a one-off payment via GoCardless, they are forewarned with the impending ‘Setup a direct debit’ and advised it doesn’t mean they are setting up a recurring payment.
The following screen will then display once ‘Pay Here’ has been clicked on:
Master Forms
One of the most useful tricks of our membership software! Under ‘Admin’ > ‘Forms’, you can now see in one easy table which forms are linked and not linked to your master form. Linking forms to the master form means that if you need to make a change, you only need to amend the master form for all forms that are linked to be updated.
A great example is if you have 50 classes that all use the same form but you need to add one additional field. If these are linked to the master, just update this and all forms linking to it will get updated too.
You can also easily link and unlink forms from the master, using the checkbox functionality below:
The following will then display:
Activity Logs
If you have multiple administrators, sometimes people do things they shouldn’t! Now you can track to see who does what with our activity logs. You can track activity for a specific member by going to their record or to track activities for multiple members – go to ‘Admin’ > ‘Activity Logs’
The following processes are logged:
So now if a payment request has mysteriously disappeared, you’ll be able to see why!
New ways to calculate fees based on the number of hours/sessions a person attends
If you charge based on the number of hours/sessions a person attends a week, rolled up to a monthly, termly or quarterly fee, our new functionality can help. Here’s how:
Step 1
To create a payment table, go to ‘Subscription Options’> ‘Payment Table’. Here, we have set one up for squad fees that relate to the number of hours and cost:
Step 2
In the class settings (‘Subscription Options’ > ‘Classes’), create a new class and set the duration for it.
A window to select the duration will then appear as shown below:
Step 3
When requesting payment within our membership software, the system will check all classes a person does and add together the number hours/sessions. It will then cross-reference that to the Payment Table. For example, if they are doing 5 hours a week across 3 classes, it will calculate the cost of £40 (using our example above). This calculation is done using a Payment Category which is used for creating the payment request. Within the Payment Category settings, you can stipulate whether the charge you’ve set out in the Payment Table is a single payment (for example, termly), monthly, quarterly, bi-annually or annually:
You can select which groups/classes should be considered when calculating costs and if you have multiple Payment Tables, you can select the relevant one.
To request payment using this process, the member will need to be in the class and added to the Payment Category. The latter will prompt you to generate a payment request.
Edit wording for optional extras
Up until now, if you wanted to sell additional items within the members online account the header they appeared under was labeled ‘Optional Extras’. This description may not always resonate with the end-user so you now have the option to create your own header. For example, if you are selling kit, you can rename ‘Optional Extras’ to ‘Club Kit’.
This setting is under ‘Admin’ > ‘Settings’:
Events
We have made several improvements in the ‘Event Registration’ process which we’ve outlined below:
1. Counting number of registrations
When viewing the number of people that have registered for an event you can now see the number of total bookings made (illustrated below as the left-hand-side number). We also show the total number of people that made the booking (shown as the right-hand-side number). This change was made so we can accurately represent the number of bookings made.
2. Number of tickets bought
We have created a system field that states the number tickets bought/bookings made by a person. This is shown in the persons’ record:
3. Overbooking
We’ve added functionality that prevents overbooking within our membership software when multiple people are registering for an event with limited spaces. Now, when someone registers, their space is reserved for 15 minutes from the point of clicking the pay button.
If they exceed this time limit, still make payment and the event has become full, they will be notified and navigated to a page where they can get a refund from PayPal or cancel the payment for GoCardless.
Group size limits
We have added the functionality to limit the size of standard groups and create waiting lists when that group is full. This is helpful if you want to set a limit on the number of people that can sign up through your registration page, but no payment needs to be made.
In the example below, we’ve created a standard group for a free ‘Saturday Morning Taster Session’ and limited the session to 20 spaces. There’s an option to enable a waiting list so if the group becomes full, people can still indicate their interest. If the waiting list option isn’t enabled, and the group becomes full, the person registering will receive an on-screen message telling them that.
System performance
Over the spring/summer, our membership software became a victim of its own success. The rapid growth in payments and processes on the system (we now process over 500,000 a year) meant access to our service became slow at peak times. We apologise for this, but as a result, we added more servers and de-coupled system sapping processes from our main application. These processes are now hosted on separate servers so when they’re running, general performance isn’t affected. We also spent two months optimising many of the reports the system generates so clients can access information quicker than ever before. We’re always looking to improve!
That concludes our blog on recent updates. We will be releasing blog posts on system updates monthly now so keep an eye out to see what else we are up to behind the scenes in the coming months. Thanks for reading and we hope you continue to enjoy our membership software and the new updates!
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If you like the sound of the above updates and you aren’t already part of the Pay Subs Online family, we encourage you to take a free, no obligation tour and see for yourself just how good it is! Alternatively, we’ve compiled a handy, free PDF detailing ‘Which Admin Tasks Can Be Done Quicker and Easier Online’. If you’d like to download it for free, click here!
The post Updates to our Membership Software, October 2017 appeared first on PaySubsOnline.com Blog.
