Introduction

MMM products allow us to give members access to certain events, services and facilities as offered by the club. It is a general concept but where the predominate purpose is to provide members with annual subscriptions. A subscription, therefore, is a product.

Apart from subscriptions, products can be used to allow members to buy into certain programmes like coaching. Or to buy into certain events like social or tournament events. Or for non-members to buy trial periods or other transient access rights to the club. If a product has no fee, they are only accessible by a club official and these can be used to “give” to a member. For example, a product offering 3 free courts over a month’s period might be a fun way to reward someone for something or other.

Products are not the only way to pay for club services. A member’s club balance exists to enable fast, easy micropayments. These include bar purchases, court fees and tournament/event participations that attract just nominal fees. Products are meant for more meaty things.

Each of the fields presented are explained below. They are grouped into 7 sections:

1. Main details
2. Automatic assignment
3. Timing
4. Restrictions
5. Courts
6. Zero cost family member assignments
7. Discounting

Main details

Product name

Give a name that clearly identifies the spirit of the product. Make it short and snappy.

Full description

Go to town a little on this one. It’s something that your members will be able to read before deciding whether it is for them or not. Maybe summarise the key features as encoded in the 7 groupings - period, restrictions and discounts especially.

Product permits the playing of a sport

Check this box if the product is intended to facilitate the buyer to play one of the sports supported by the club. This is particularly used when assessing the eligibility a member has for a product that requires membership. If this is the case, the membership product must have this option checked.

Type

One of three options:

1. Membership. A membership product is a subscription. The key thing about a membership product is that a member can only have one of these at any one time.
2. Standalone. A member can have any number of different stand alone products overlapping at the same time, though the same product can not be bought simultaneously.
3. Event. An event product ties the purchaser of the product to a specific event thus allowing a member to “buy into” a tournament or a programme. This is intended for more meaty events and commitments like junior coaching programmes. It is not meant for regular club tournaments that might have a small entrance fee. Payments for these are managed separately on the tournament itself.

Joining Fee

A joining fee is relevant for membership type products only and indicates a one-off fee to be applied the first time the product is purchased. The joining fee will only be charged if the member has held no other membership product over the last year in any section of the club. Non-playing memberships do not count for this purpose.

Full fee

The full fee for the product assuming up front payment. If you leave this blank with a monthly fee specified, members will not get the choice to pay up front - if they buy the product then it must be on monthly terms.

Fee if payed monthly

The full fee for the product should the member choose to pay monthly - leave this blank if you do not wish to give this option. The monthly fee schedule will be calculated at the time of purchase by dividing this fee by the number of months available over which to make payment (i.e. for the duration of the product).

Prepay months

Optionally set the number of monthly payments to be prepaid immediately when buying the subscription. This affords a further level of financial commitment for monthly payers.

Without this option being specified (or set to zero), even the 1st instalment will not be taken from the members account until the evening of the day of purchase. To ensure the member has enough funds to support this they may be required to top-up their account (by at least the minimum top-up amount of £25) upon purchase to  cover this expected payment.

But by specifying at least one month here, we can remove this requirement and take the initial payment straight away. It may be, particularly for small monthly payments, that asking for 3 months immediate payment is not unreasonable.

Automatic assignment

This is a special feature that should not be required for most products. It allows you to instruct ManageMyMatch to automatically assign this product (it can be a membership or another type of product) should the user have a membership with either another sports section of the same club, or even if the user is a member of a different club entirely.

Typically it is useful to confer some kind of rights to one section of the club when the user is a member of another. For example, you might want to allow limited squash court access when the member is principally a tennis member. Or you might have an agreement with a nearby club that their members may use your club for limited services (presumably a reciprocal arrangement).

You can either simply identify the club where membership would confer this product automatically, or you could specify a particular membership category - though this is only possible for the same overall club (you cannot see the membership categories of entirely different clubs).

Another example is where the club has two sections and you have a membership category that grants full access to both. In this case you would define the category under both sections and make each confer the other when one "side" is bought.

Timing

Period & count

Here you specify a period of time over which this product will apply. You give a number of so many days, weeks, months, quarters, terms or years.

Availability

Either “unavailable” or a number of months. Unavailable means that members will not have any access to this product. This is useful if you have a product that you only want to make available at certain times. If you specify a number of months this means the product will be available for purchase for that number of months preceding its commencement date.

If a product has has neither a full or pay-monthly price, this too will not be made available to a member (such products can only be assigned by the membership secretary). The exception to this rule is when a zero-priced product is included as part of a family product as specified in "zero cost family member products". In this case the zero-priced product will only be offered as part of a family package as it would be free anyway.

Set start date to beginning of period

Normally a product will start (become active for the purchaser) on the day they choose to buy it and will terminate as per its period. If you check this box, the start date is adjusted to start on an appropriate anniversary according to the period as follows:

• Days - no difference, still starts today!
• Weeks - Starts on a monday
• Months - Starts on the 1st of the month
• Quarters - Starts on Jan/Apr/Jul/Oct
• Terms - Starts on Jan/May/Sep
• Years - Start January 1st

In these cases (apart from days), the buyer will have the opportunity to select a period which is current or the next one. For example, if a product lasts for a month and today is the 10th March then March and April will be selectable. If a current period is chosen then the fee charged will be prorated (to the nearest lesser period - e.g. nearest week in this case).

Allow current period only

Only relevant if you've set the start date to beginning of period. Check this if you only want people to buy this product if it starts today or earlier than today. This is useful if you have a one off product that you want to make available now but do not want people to purchase for the future.

Ensure continuity

Setting this ensures that when a membership is purchased it is back dated to when the previous membership (if one was recently held) expired. There are two scenarios where this would apply:

1. For fixed start date memberships, it is quite possible for an existing member to purchase a membership in advance. Typically this happens as the membership is coming to an end and the member wishes to renew ahead of time. In most circumstances the renewal will start the day after the expiry of the current. However, a circumstance can arise where the new membership starts beyond the date of current membership expiry. This would leave a "hole" where the user would not have a membership between the expiry of their current membership and the commencement of the next. It may be this is intentional, but by selecting this option you tell MMM to "close the gap" and start the new membership immediately after the current membership expires. Beware, however, that this will mean that the user enjoys the membership for a longer period but for the same price. This closing of the gap only happens when the user currently holds a membership (i.e. has not reached its expiry date). If the user does not hold a membership the gap is not retrospectively closed.
2. For rolling memberships (not fixed start) this would ensure that a late renewal does not start from the date of purchase but starts from the date of previous membership expiry. In this case, the end date is set as though the user had bought it on time, thereby avoiding their membership period creeping forward due to a brief period of technical non-membership. This will happen however late the user renews - so long as it is within the membership period specification (e.g. 1 year). If you wish to mitigate this, you can always set a pro-rata rule to choose to discount a very late purchase.

Cut over point

Only relevant if you've set the start date to beginning of period. This allows you to set a number of days before the end of the first period during which the product cannot be bought starting within that period.

For example, if you have an annual membership subscription and you set this to 10 days, then during the last 10 days of the year the user would not be given the opportunity to purchase a subscription for the current period. The logic being that even with a prorata payment (which could only be for a month), it's hardly worth buying a subscription for the last few days of the year - you might as well start a new one in the new year.

Another example might be for a shorter term product - perhaps one that can start on any month for, say, 3 months. You may not want people to join mid month. Here's what would happen if you set this to 28 days:

• On the 20th April, you can only buy the product starting 1st May
• On the 10th April, same as above
• Only up until the 2nd of April would someone be able to buy the product that starts in April

In fact, if in the above example you were to set the cut off to be 40 days, then to start in May you'd have to buy it before 20th March.

Leave this field blank if you don't want any of this logic to kick in

Starts

Only applies to Year period products with fixed start date. The month in the year in which the product starts.

Lead in

Only applies to Year period products with fixed start date or with continuity ensured. The number of months that need to have passed since the start date before a late purchase attracts a pro-rata discount.

Granularity

Once a pro-rata discount kicks in the normal procedure is to pro-rata based on each whole number of months that are left. However, this can be blocked more ‘severely’, say, to 3 which would mean that the pro-rata would calculate based on the number of 3-month periods that are left. Setting this to ‘none’ turns off pro-rata calculations completely.

There is a cushion for the case where someone wants to buy a membership towards the end of a "block" as described above. To take an example, suppose we have an annual membership starting in January and, after 3 months (lead-in=3) members are prorata'd according to the number of whole months remaining for the year. So someone buying on April the 10th will qualify for a prorata fee of 9/12ths of the annual fee - i.e. they would pay for months April through to December. But what if someone buys on March 31st? Seems rather unfair that, had they waited one more day, they would pay  8/12ths the fee. So MMM actually calculates the prorata assuming a purchase in the following month for up to a week prior. In fact, the number of weeks for which this concession is made is set to the granularity. So if the granularity is 3 months then the prorata is taken from the start of the next period if you are within 3 weeks of it.

Similar logic happens for memberships that last for a number of quarters or terms. Even for memberships that are specified in months (they are prorated in blocks of weeks), the logic above applies, though the units then are days rather than weeks.

Restrictions

Age

A programme or subscription can be limited to members of a specific age range. Their age is compared in relation to the start date of the programme or subscription. If, on that date their age is equal or greater than the lower age limit and less than the upper age then they are eligible. For example, if some-one is 18 on the very day a product with age limits 16-18 starts then they are not eligible.

Distance

A programme or subscription can be limited to members dependent on the distance their home is from the club. This is measured using the members postcode and Google’s shortest route by road to the club’s postcode. If the distance (in rounded kilometers) is equal or greater than the lower limit and less than the upper limit then they are eligible.

Requires family head membership

If checked, this product will only be available to a member who is a family head or whose family head has club membership as at the time of commencement of this product.

Requires own membership

Only applies if the product is not a membership type. If checked, this product will only be available to persons who have themselves a membership with the club as at the time of commencement of this product.

Only available to new members

Only applies if the product is a membership type. If checked, the membership product will only be available to people who are not or have not been members of the club for at least 10 months.

Courts

Select court sets and the fee that applies

A product can permit the use of certain courts at certain prices. This is done by selecting a ‘court set’ and the price to be applied for booking courts in that court set.

A court set is the identification of a set of courts at certain times over a week period. These are set up separately in the “Court sets” tab of “Manage courts”.

A number of these can be set against the product. For example peak courts could be at one price and non-peak courts could be at another price.

If no court sets are given here, then ownership of this product will not permit court bookings, although the member might be in possession of other products that do (or could be a participant of a tournament that has its own court permissions).

Court availability, in general, depends on the confluence of products and events the member is part of. For any one specific court booking the cheapest one will be what is charged.

Max bookings

The maximum number of court bookings this product allows

Zero cost family member assignments

There is considerable flexibility in allowing a family head to assign various products to their family members for free based on purchasing a "family" membership (or product) for themselves. Clearly such a membership would be at a premium but the club needs to control the number and types of memberships available to the purchaser for assignment to their family members. In this section you can choose all the products that you are prepared to discount to zero cost and, for each, limit the number of those products that would attract this discount. It will not stop the purchaser from choosing any eligible product for their family members - it simply controls and limits which will get a full family discount.

You can also set an overall limit of the number of family memberships you are prepared to discount.

To take an example, you might set a membership that allows (in addition to the family head) 1 adult, 1 student and 3 child memberships to be assigned to family members for free, but still limit the total to 3 free memberships. This would allow for example:

• 1 adult, 1 student, 1 child
• 1 adult, 2 children
• 3 children
• 1 student, 2 children
• 1 adult

In the following scenarios, charges would apply in part:

• 1 adult, 1 student and 3 children (2 children will be charged)
• 1 adult, 3 children (1 child will be charged)
• 1 student, 3 children (1 child will be charged)
• 2 adults (1 adult will be charged)
• 1 adult, 2 students (1 student will be charged)

When the user chooses products for their family members, the normal price together with any other discounts are still shown. But if the membership is eligible for family discount as per these rules, then a further family discount will apply netting the cost to zero.

Consistent with other discounting schemes, the discount does not apply to the joiners fee. If the family member is not a previous member and the product attracts a joiners fee then that fee will be charged. If this is not what you want, then there is a club-wide setting (Details tab) that you can set that suppresses joiner fees for all family members.

Discounts

Early payment fixed discount

A fixed amount that is discounted from the product fee when purchased on or before its commencement date,

Order discount per year in advance

A percentage discount from the product fee when it is purchased on or before its commencement date, applied for every year in advance of purchase.

Discount on family memberships

Family membership discounts will apply if at least one other family member also has a family membership discount eligibility. The discount will only be available if the other family member has a current subscription as at the time of the commencement of the subscription being purchased. The discount is applied after any early payment or pro-rata discount has also been applied. For example if the fee is £330 and an early payment discount of £25 applies then a 10% family discount would be calculated on £305, giving a family discount of £30.50.

Dual sport discount

Applied if the member has a subscription to a different sports section of the club and that membership also is eligible for a dual sports discount. The discount is applied so long as the member’s other subscription has an end date beyond the current time of purchase (not necessarily at the time of subscription commencement).