Understand Your Membership Reports

Your account includes two primary tools for understanding your membership data: the Membership Dashboard and the Membership Subscriptions Report. This guide explains how to use both and clarifies common questions about your membership numbers.

A. The Membership Dashboard

The dashboard provides a powerful, real-time, high-level overview of your active membership subscriptions. It's designed for a quick snapshot of your current membership health.

The key figures on the dashboard, including "Total Active Subscriptions" and the breakdowns by plan and payment method, are calculated using subscriptions that are currently Valid (paid up) or Overdue (in a grace period after a failed payment).

Subscriptions that are Expired   or Cancelled   are intentionally excluded from these totals.

B. The Membership Subscriptions Report

This report provides a detailed, line-by-line list of every individual subscription in your system. It is the best tool for in-depth analysis.

Unlike the dashboard, you can filter this report to show subscriptions of any status, including Valid  , Overdue  , Expired  , and Cancelled  . You can also sort by any column or export the data to a spreadsheet for further investigation.

Common Questions & Troubleshooting

It's common for the numbers in your reports to raise questions. Here are the two most frequent scenarios and how to understand them.

1. Why are there more People/Organisations than active subscriptions?

Your database of People and Organisations is a master list of all your contacts, not just currently active members. A contact will exist in your database but not be counted on the Membership Dashboard if they:

• Have no subscription: They might be an email newsletter subscriber, a past event attendee, or a donor, without ever having held a membership.
• Have an inactive subscription: They may have a membership subscription that is Expired   or Cancelled  .

The dashboard focuses only on active, paying members (Valid   or Overdue  ), while your contacts list contains everyone.

2. Why are there more subscriptions than people with subscriptions?

This situation occurs when one person or organisation has more than one active subscription.

This can often be intentional. For example, a single organisation might purchase separate subscriptions for different staff members or departments.

However, it can sometimes be the result of a mistake, such as a member accidentally signing up twice.

How to check for duplicates:

You can investigate this using the Membership Subscriptions report:

• Scan visually: Sort the report by the "Contact" column. This will group all subscriptions for the same person or organisation together, making it easy to scan for duplicates.
• Export to a spreadsheet: For a more thorough check, export the report. You can then use spreadsheet tools like "Conditional Formatting" to highlight duplicate names or email addresses.