Membership and Payment Reconciliation

Membership lived in several places, and they didn’t agree. The roster was a hand-kept spreadsheet. The public directory could be edited only by site admins. Current dues ran through one payment system, older payments through another, and invoices through a third tool. Data-entry errors had kept some members off autopay, and declined cards weren’t reliably flagged.

The association wanted one unified accounting of its members.

Matching the records was the easy part: first by email, then by business and owner name when emails differed. The harder question was which list to trust.

The roster and the directory recorded who was supposed to be a member. The recurring-billing system recorded who was actually paying. So billing became the source of truth, and every other list was compared against it. It took three passes in one morning to land there, and each pass showed more about how the records had drifted.

Payments were sorted by membership tier. Event tickets, headshots, and room rentals were set aside so they wouldn’t count as dues.

The reconciled workbook had one row per business, with tabs for the work that needed doing: who needed follow-up, which directory listings were out of date, which members had lapsed, and who was paying but missing from the directory.

The membership assistant was built so staff could ask a question, like who’s due this month or whether a business is paid up, and get an answer naming which of the five lists it came from, in the association’s own terms, with the date of the data.

A second version read the live member list directly and handed counting to a separate step, so totals didn’t depend on the AI adding things up.

The reconciliation produced one view of the membership as of a single date: who was paying, who was due, whose cards were declining, and which directory listings didn’t match a paying member.

For the association’s September 2026 Home & Garden Show, we built an exhibitor application for members. Each application was saved, and the vendor went straight on to payment. It replaced an old form that couldn’t hand off to payment.