What this does: Collects dues after invoices go out: billing new members, adding late fees to overdue invoices, and dropping members who never pay.
Applies to: GrowthZone associations that bill membership dues. You need staff access to Finance and Memberships. Use only the phases that fit your association.
Before you start: Agree your timeline for late fees, suspension and drops (see Define your timeline first). Run billing first: see Run Annual Dues Billing: Prep to Delivery.
Time needed: About an hour to set up. Then a few minutes each time a timeline step comes due.
On this page
Why this matters
Feel free to pick and choose the processes here that will help you collect overdue payments from your members. If you have questions about whether a particular setting or workflow is right for your association, contact GrowthZone Support to discuss.
Decide before you start
Every association has unique processes, procedures, and schedules for tracking and collecting overdue invoices. Before you begin, gather your team and decide on the following business rules:
- How many days past due does an invoice have to be before we add a late fee — and do we add more than one round?
- What is the late fee amount, and which GL accounts does it post to?
- Who is exempt? Do we allow special payment arrangements, and how do we mark those members so they are skipped?
- At what point do we drop unpaid members, and who signs off on that decision?
- When we drop a member, do we write off their open invoices or leave them open?
- Do we want new members to pay a prorated invoice for the current cycle plus the next full cycle at the time they apply?
Define your timeline first
Before configuring anything, map out when your association will take each action on overdue invoices — first reminder, late fee, second late fee, suspension, drop. The phases below are the mechanics; your timeline is the policy that drives them.
Work through the phases that apply to your association. Phase 1 focuses on correctly capturing new members; Phases 2 and 3 are your escalation path for members who do not pay.
Phase 1: Collect Dues From New Members
After invoicing your active members for dues, collect prorated dues and current dues from new members. GrowthZone has two features to make this as easy as possible — creating the correct invoices and saving a credit card on the membership application.
1.1 — Create Prorated Dues Invoice and Full Dues Invoice
Go to Memberships, Settings section, click Proration Settings.
| Setting | Recommendation | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Bill Next Cycle Now | Enable | The system creates a prorated invoice for the remainder of the current billing cycle, and an invoice for the next billing cycle. |
| Lead Days to Charge Next Bill (Realtor Edition) | Set per billing frequency | Per billing frequency, the number of days before a new billing cycle that the system creates an invoice for the current and next billing cycles. Generally, start this on or slightly before the day you create invoices for your active members’ association dues. |
1.2 — Capture Credit Card on Application and Charge on Membership Approval
Go to Memberships, Settings section, click Application Forms, then edit your association membership application.
| Setting | Recommendation | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Automatically Approve Applications | Disable | You and your staff should have a chance to review applications before approving them. That lets you review their letter of good standing, check their license, and run any other checks. This is likely already disabled for your association membership application — but if enabled, this setting will prevent you from enabling the next setting. |
| Capture Payment Profile and Charge on Approval | Enable | Applicants will be required to provide a credit card before submitting a membership application. When you’re ready to approve the new member, the system will charge their provided card. |
1.3 — Process Submitted Membership Applications
Click Submitted Applications in the Memberships section. For current and future pending applications, click the Gavel icon to view the applicant’s information. The View Application button shows the information as entered on the form.
Phase 2: Late Fees
Late fees in GrowthZone are added to unpaid invoices. Select the overdue invoices that should receive a late fee, then add the late fee. Members who never received a dues invoice will not have a late fee added.
Late fees are added as a new line item on the original invoice. The late fee line item has an “invoice date” of the date the late fee was added. This prevents new AR activity in a previously closed month.
2.1 — Setting Up Late Fees
Go to Finance, Administrative section, click Billing Settings and select Fee Items. Create a new fee item and set the Fee Item Type to Late Fee. Set the Product Category and Description fields as you’d like. Work with your accountant to set the appropriate Income, Receivables, and Deposit Accounts.
Do not check the Is Recurring Fee checkbox. If you add multiple late fees to overdue association dues invoices, use the same fee item for each round of late fees if all the money goes to the same GL accounts.
2.2 — Flag Contacts to Exclude
If you allow members to make special arrangements to pay their dues on an alternate schedule to avoid late fees, the best way to exclude them from receiving a late fee (or suspension) is to apply a tag to their contact. You can exclude these members when filtering the list of invoices to receive late fees. Example tag: “Late Fee Waived”.
To apply the tag, open the member’s contact record and, in the Tags panel on the Overview tab, click the edit (pencil) icon. In Add Contact Tags, type the tag name in the Add Tags field, press Enter, then click Done. Typing a name that does not already exist creates the tag.
To review the tags already in use — and how many contacts, memberships, or events each one is applied to — go to Settings, General section, click Tags.
2.3 — Add Late Fees to Members
Filter unpaid invoices to overdue association dues invoices. Go to Memberships, click Unpaid — this screen opens pre-filtered to unpaid membership dues invoices that are at least one day overdue. Click the filter (funnel) icon to open Membership Overdue Filter, where you can set the number of days overdue, specific membership types, and so on.
Add late fees to the selected invoices. Click the ADD LATE FEES button, select the fee item you created in 2.1, and set the desired price of the late fee. Click Apply Changes to add the late fees. Depending on how many invoices you’re adding late fees to, this may take a couple of hours.
2.4 — Notify Members of Late Fees
After adding late fees to invoices, you may want to notify your members they now owe a late fee. Quickly email or print those invoices from Unpaid while reusing the same filtering you used to add the late fees. To review creating an email template or emailing invoices, see the Run Annual Dues Billing: Prep to Delivery, Phases 4 and 6.
Phase 3: Drop Unpaid Members
The last step in your escalation path. Filter carefully — this action affects memberships, directory listings, and open invoices in bulk.
3.1 — Filter Unpaid Invoices to Overdue Association Dues Invoices
Go to Memberships, click Unpaid. By default, this screen lists all open invoices for membership dues. Click the filter (funnel) icon and filter by membership type, invoice date, and tag so only the members who have the correct overdue invoices will be dropped:
| Filter | Set to |
|---|---|
| Membership Types | All association memberships that have local, state, and national dues. (Excludes any MLS or lockbox fees on a different schedule.) |
| Invoice Date | Date used on the initial run of association dues invoices. (Excludes any members who have recently joined.) |
| Exclude Tags | Tags added to prevent a member from being dropped. (See 2.2 above for more information about excluding contacts by tag.) |
3.2 — Notify Members Before You Drop Them
To review creating an email template or emailing invoices, see the Run Annual Dues Billing: Prep to Delivery, Phases 4 and 6.
3.3 — Drop Members Associated with Selected Invoices
Next to the ADD LATE FEES button is a small down-pointed arrow. Click it to expand the actions menu and select Drop Members.
This screen walks through options for removing a variety of benefits from dropped members. The most important option is whether to leave unpaid invoices open or to write them off. GrowthZone suggests writing off the open invoices to keep your accounting records clear and to avoid confusion if the member rejoins in the future. Depending on how many members you’re dropping, this may take a couple of hours.
Consultant pro-tip: Write the timeline down before you need it
The associations that collect the most, with the fewest awkward phone calls, are the ones whose members already knew the schedule — late fee on day 30, suspension on day 60, drop on day 90 — because it was published before the first invoice went out. Decide your dates once, put them in the dues email, and then let the filters do the work. And build your exclude tag early: the member who called in October to arrange a payment plan is exactly the member you do not want to discover in a bulk drop in January.