Fee Types have many functions and are critically important to properly billing your members and to accounting for the club. We will review these items here.
Fee Types are used to put your products into 'like' categories. The most common are Fee Types are:
*Membership Fee
Discounts
Initiation Fee
Equity Fee (sometimes called a Bond fee)
Late Fees (sometimes called Penalty fees)
* House Guest Fee (any sort of paid seasonal pass)
* Guest Fee
* Balance Due
* Account Balance
Fee Types of note *
There are some special fee types that have underlying functionality to them. Please note these and what they do.
The Membership Fee is a special fee type in Member Splash. When a member pays for a product assigned to this fee type, their payment status is automatically updated from UNPAID to PAID. This is the only fee type that triggers this status change.
Even if you rename the Membership Fee (e.g., to "Family Fee" or "Annual Dues"), it retains the unique slug system identifier "membership-fee" and must be used for payments that determine membership status. Using any other fee type—such as Annual Dues—will not trigger the system to mark a member as PAID.
If you suspect your club's fee structure may be incorrectly configured, it’s a good idea to audit your fee types. Ensure that your designated membership payment product is correctly assigned to the Membership Fee type to avoid payment status issues.
The House Guest Fee Type - anyone added to an account with this fee type is removed after each season based on the end date of the season for each club. As of July 2022, we now allow multiple products on one fee type so if you have a Nanny Pass for $75 and a Grandparent Pass for $125, you can now set BOTH of these products up on your system.
The Guest Fee - this fee type puts guest passes on the member account.
One Fee Type Per Product
Every product must have a fee Type. Should you think that your product is not billing it is likely because you have not selected a Fee Type for the product.
Fee Types and Accounting (your treasurer will love you)
Fee Types are the basic elements used for accounting purposes. To know where your revenue comes from (or is going) you have to categorize your charges, Fee Types do just that. From an accounting perspective every charge has to belong to a specific revenue category, or you can't generate accurate reports. For example, you certainly want to make sure your Discounts are put into Discount Fee Type so that you can see how much revenue discounts account for to your bottom line.