It's fairly common for members to have more than one membership at a time. Often a member may have a recurring membership, but also purchase a pack of PT sessions, a locker rental add-on, or any other services your facility offers. In these cases the system decides which membership is considered the primary membership, this is then used if there is ever a case where only one membership can be used for something. For example; when checking in, reporting, or communicating with your members via templates. We'll go in to more detail on each of these cases below.
Check-in
For a member to check in they must have a membership, this is because the information that enables access to your facility comes from the membership. Specifically this comes from the benefits on the membership, for more on door access benefits, see the article Setting up Door Benefits.
If you're performing a manual check in then you get the freedom to choose which membership to attempt to check in.
If your members check themselves in, generally by RFID key fob, then the access control system has to prioritise a membership to check in with. The membership that gets used depends on a few different factors, firstly only memberships that have benefits that allow access to the facility are considered. If a membership is suspended or expired, then the benefits are no longer valid. Next the system will prioritise memberships based off first, their Programme Basis and then their Start date in ascending order. We've included a programme basis order list below.
For example, a member with two priority one memberships will be checked in with the one that started first.
A member with a priority one membership and a priority four, will be checked in on their priority one membership regardless of start dates.
| Priority | Programme Basis |
| 1 | Open Ended & Renewal Based Contracts |
| 2 | Preset Date Programme |
| 3 | Addon Programme |
| 4 | Club Visit Pack |
| 5 | Class & Booking Pack |
| 6 | Charge Per Visit |
Reporting
When running a report for member details, if you want to add a column for the name of the member's membership, only one can be chosen so we prioritise the primary membership. Take the Current Members report for example, each row represents one member, to include a member's membership name when they have more than one membership the system has to prioritise one for display.
Reporting uses the following ordering when deciding which membership is primary: Programme Basis, Payment Cycle, Start Date descending, Price descending.
Be careful when filtering your member-centric reports by membership as the system might be selecting a different primary membership to display than you are expecting. Instead choose a report that is membership-centric, like Current Memberships instead of Current Members.
Using Templates
The template system follows the same logic as reporting. When sending communication to a member you're faced with the same problem, each member can have multiple memberships. The system must then choose one membership for fields like 'Membership Name'.
For more information on using template fields see the article, Personalising communication: Using template fields