Skip to Content
Help Center

Create, Correct, and Activate a Membership by Hand

On This Page

Most memberships are created and updated through orders, payments, and cancellations. Use this manual process when someone joined outside that flow, you need to correct an existing membership, an approved application is ready to become a membership, or you need to delete a membership. For new memberships, the preferred path is still a membership application, the portal, or a processed order. Entering an invoice by itself only handles billing; it does not create a membership.

Before You Begin ​

Prerequisites

  • Creating a membership by hand requires its own permission, and correcting a membership requires a separate permission.
  • Deleting a membership also requires its own permission. If you do not have it, the delete option still appears, but confirming the deletion shows an access-denied message and nothing is deleted.
  • Editing a membership by hand does not add an entry to the membership's own history, so that history does not show who made the correction or when. Manual date changes, such as a renewal date change, are still expected to appear in the account's ordinary audit logs, even though they are not added to the membership's own history list.
  • You can look up or edit a membership only for an owner who already has one. If a contact or organization has never had a membership, there is nothing to retrieve until you create one by hand or through the usual application, portal, or order process.
  • The membership ownership contact on a membership record is separate from the primary contact on an organization's CRM record. Setting an organization's primary contact in CRM does not fill in the membership's ownership contact; set that contact directly on the membership.
  • An organization's membership needs a contact assigned on the membership record itself, not only through a CRM relationship somewhere else. If you leave it blank, a later billing run can fail with an error about a missing contact, so set it when you edit or create the membership.
  • If you contact Rhythm about a membership that has not updated after payment, avoid making a manual correction first if you can. Let support see the record as it is, because a correction you make in the meantime can make the original problem harder to diagnose.
  • A portal user who can register other people for an event does not have an equivalent self-service way to join or renew a membership for someone else. Staff using this manual process, or the member acting on their own account, are the supported ways to create or renew that person's membership.

Create a Membership by Hand ​

Use this process when someone joined outside Rhythm's normal order process and needs a membership record. You can also use it when payment was taken but no membership was created.

  1. Go to Membership & Committees › Members.
  2. Click Manually Create Membership.
  3. Choose whether the owner is a contact or an organization, and pick the owner.
  4. Choose the membership type and package.
  5. Set the status, dates, and any other details you need.
  6. If your account uses chapters, sections, or add-ons, assign them here.
  7. Click Save Changes.

This form shows every custom field your account has defined for memberships, and you cannot change their order from this screen. Any custom field you add to memberships appears here automatically, even though this Rhythm-managed form is not otherwise customizable. If you need to attach a certificate, upload it on this form or on the edit form later. Certificates are uploaded one at a time; you cannot upload more than one at once.

Result

Rhythm creates the membership immediately.

Warning

Creating a membership by hand does not ask for payment, create an order, or generate a dues invoice. It bypasses the payment process entirely, so if the person still owes for this membership, create and send that invoice yourself. Note the connection on the invoice so it is easy to find later. A hand-created membership can show as active immediately even though no invoice has been paid, because it never goes through the usual order-and-payment flow.

A membership created by hand usually has no Last Order value because nothing created an order for it. If you are trying to tell whether a membership was created by hand or by normal fulfillment, a blank Last Order is a good sign it was hand-created.

Tip

You can also start from the person's or organization's own record. If they do not have a membership yet, their options menu shows Manually Create Membership instead of Edit Membership. Choosing it opens the same form with that owner already filled in, so you only need to add the type, package, and other details. Always create or update membership data from the Members area, from an owner's own record, or through an application. Do not enter it from an order screen in Orders & Inventory, because that can leave the membership or add-on linked to the wrong record, such as an organization instead of the person you meant.

A contact or organization can have only one membership record. If the owner you choose already has one, saving updates that membership instead of creating a second one. In practice, a new "purchase" for someone who already has a membership renews it rather than duplicating it. If the owner already has an inactive or terminated membership record, trying to create another one for them, whether by hand or by manually adding it in a membership application, can fail with an error that the record ID already exists. Correct the existing record instead of trying to create a second one.

Changing a contact's account type to Individual does not make them an active individual member by itself. You still need to create or activate an individual membership for them separately, using this process or an application.

When Rhythm creates a new contact, it sometimes matches them against what looks like a duplicate elsewhere and copies profile details such as title, photo, or profile link. Check those fields on a newly created member and correct anything that was copied over incorrectly.

Warning

You can create a membership by hand without linking it to any invoice or financial record, but that is not advisable. Without an invoice or order behind it, the membership's expiration date, deferral terms, and status can drift out of sync later because nothing is driving them from a payment. Link the membership to an invoice wherever you can.

A hand-created membership has no application process behind it, unlike one that came through the normal join or renewal flow. Keep that in mind when you test rejoin behavior, or when you handle an inactive imported member with no prior history in your Rhythm account. In those cases, terminate the membership properly, through a billing run or by setting it Inactive with a termination date, and have the person go through a real join process. Do not assume a hand-created record behaves the same way as one created from an application.

Tip

Creating and paying an invoice for a membership does not create or activate that membership by itself. An invoice is a billing record, not a membership record. Manually creating an invoice does not update a membership's expiration date or other information, and it does not apply member versus non-member pricing rules to add-ons. A membership's dates change only when the change comes through the membership process itself: an application, the portal, or a processed order. For an add-on to price correctly, and for an invoice to be generated automatically, process a membership order with the add-on rather than creating the invoice by hand. Likewise, if you change an existing member's type by hand instead of through an order, it will not automatically create the matching invoice. You need to invoice it yourself, and the recommended way to change a member's type is still to process a membership order with the new type, which creates the invoice for you and uses the portal's normal pricing.

To add a person to an institutional membership that has already been paid for, process it from the organization's own record using Change Affiliation so the add-on invoice is created correctly. Processing it as an individual membership from the person's own record does not invoice it the same way.

If you are recovering from a payment problem:

  • If payment was taken but the membership record was never created, use this process to create the membership by hand and note the connection on the invoice.
  • If a paid transaction exists but the application record itself is missing, that is unusual. It is usually faster and safer to refund the transaction and have the person submit a new application than to reconstruct the missing application by hand.
  • If a member cannot complete a renewal payment online, you can take payment by phone or another channel and manually update the membership so the renewal goes through without waiting for the online issue to be resolved.
  • If a split payment fails with an unexpected error partway through membership processing, avoid retrying it right away. Repeated attempts can risk an unintended extra authorization. Finish the membership as invoice, pay-later instead, and complete the payment once things clear.
  • Fixing whatever originally stopped a membership from being created does not retroactively repair records that were already affected before the fix went in. Those records still need the same manual review and correction described here.
  • If automated processing also failed to create a related record, such as an event registration that should have come with the membership, check for it and create that record by hand too if it is missing.

If the owner's previous membership package or type has since been retired and has no practical expiration date, you may need to give the old membership a real expiration date and drop it in a billing run before you can start a fresh membership for that owner. See How a Billing Run Sends Notices and Drops Members.

Tip

Rhythm Academy has walkthroughs and concept reviews for common membership administration tasks if you are new to managing memberships and want a guided starting point beyond this article.

Create or Update Many Memberships at Once ​

For a handful of records, use the steps above. For many records, use import and bulk-update tools instead of opening each membership one at a time.

  • Bringing in contacts and memberships that do not exist yet is a custom data task, not a mass update. A mass update only changes records that already exist. Go to System & Security › Custom Data Tasks, choose the Contacts/Memberships task, and use Import Records to add an owner_type column to your file and map it during import. Support does not offer a separate post-implementation import service for new contacts, organizations, or memberships beyond this; imports of that kind are otherwise handled as part of implementation.
  • The Contacts/Memberships task expects membership data. It requires a membership type ID or package ID. If you only want to bring in contacts with no membership information, this is not the right import, because it produces validation errors for the missing membership fields.
  • Map the membership fields you need. After choosing Contacts/Membership and uploading your file, map columns such as Type ID, Package ID, Expiration Date, Status, Contact, and Name to the matching fields. Filter the field list if you cannot find one. There is no separate template to download; build your file from a query of existing memberships that includes the fields you want to set, or from the field names on the Create/Edit Membership form.
  • Owner type values are case-sensitive and lowercase. Use contact or organization, not a capitalized form. Contact produces an invalid-owner-type error.
  • The owner ID column combines the owner type and the record ID, for example organization:<id>, not the owner type and record ID in separate columns.
  • A value mapped to Member ID must already point to an existing membership record, or the task fails. An invalid contact ID or related ID also fails the row.
  • A task can look like it succeeded when it did not. If the results file shows every row as ready for execution, or shows zero completed categories, check the actual records rather than assuming the membership rows were created.
  • Add contacts before adding committee memberships in the same file. The Committee Membership import service has limited contact-specific fields, so create new contact records first, then add their committee memberships as a separate step. The same two-step approach, importing or creating the contacts first and then adding memberships as a separate bulk change, also avoids problems when you add a large number of contacts and memberships together in one pass.
  • Updating an existing membership by import validates against the Membership ID, not the Contact ID. If the contact does not yet have a membership record, using their Contact ID on the membership update or mass-update path fails because there is no membership record to match. Use the Contacts/Memberships custom data task to create one first. Rhythm does not match an uploaded row to an existing contact by email address on this path, so you still need the correct record ID in your file.
  • Membership updates use the Contact/Membership data task, not Address Change. The Address Change data task only touches address fields; run membership changes through Contacts/Membership instead.

Tip

When you mass update memberships, use Mass Updates in System & Security, choose the Membership & Committees application and the Memberships service, and key the file on Membership ID. If you are setting the membership type or package for many records, include both the type ID and the package ID fields in the file, because the type alone is not enough. Membership Type, Membership Package, and the Is New flag can all be changed this way, as can Status and dates such as Expiration Date, so you rarely need to edit records one at a time once you have identified them with a query. Uploaded status values must exactly match one of active, inactive, suspended, or active without benefits.

For membership numbers, a mass update needs only the Membership ID and Membership Number columns. To correct one record's number by hand, edit it under Other Info on the membership. The starting number for newly created memberships can be set to a particular seed during implementation, so new records continue from wherever your account's numbering left off.

Warning

A small number of membership expiration dates can resist being cleared through a mass update and need to be corrected on the individual record instead. If you see this, check the record directly rather than repeating the mass update. Selecting Add Ons as the field to change in a membership mass update can also fail during execution with an error like "No id presented" instead of applying the change. If that happens, correct add-on quantities on the individual membership record instead.

If a membership query still shows a contact's old name after you renamed them in CRM, run a mass update from that same membership query, keyed on Membership ID, to resync the name. If the name still does not update, making a small temporary change to the CRM contact's name and then changing it back before rerunning the mass update has been used to force the resync.

If a batch of memberships were incorrectly inactivated by an expiration-processing issue and later had their expiration date corrected, you can often find and fix them together. Query for records that match the corrected expiration date, an Inactive status, and an existing termination date, then mass update those records to clear the termination date and set status back to Active.

Bulk update is also the fastest way to walk back a systematic mistake. If a query shows memberships with the wrong expiration date, status, or term because of a data problem, a bulk update from that query's results can correct all of them at once instead of one field at a time.

Rhythm has no single action that reassigns one membership package to every organization holding it. To migrate organizations from one package to another in bulk, run a sequence of bulk updates from a query: change the Membership Type and Package fields with a mass update keyed on Membership ID, then adjust add-on quantities separately.

To remove memberships for many people at once, such as when a set of contacts should register as non-members going forward, run a query for the affected memberships and use Bulk Changes to delete them. This deletes the membership records, not the underlying contacts or organizations, just like deleting one membership by hand. Choosing Mass Delete on a membership query result deletes the membership record and its history completely. It does not just remove an open order and leave the rest of the record in place.

Correct an Existing Membership ​

Use this process to fix a status, date, chapter, add-on, or another field that automatic processing got wrong or that needs a manual update.

  1. Open the person's or organization's own record.
  2. From the options menu, choose Edit Membership — or click the pencil icon on the Membership Info panel.
  3. Change whatever needs correcting.
  4. Click Save Changes.

Result

The membership is saved with your changes, and the page returns to the owner's record.

Only built-in fields appear in the main Create/Edit Membership section of this form. If your account has custom fields for memberships, they appear together lower on the same screen.

A few rules apply while you correct a membership:

  • Active memberships can't carry a termination date. The Termination Date field appears only when the status is Inactive. If you change the status away from Inactive, Rhythm removes any termination date you entered when you save. A termination date can also keep renewal-related actions from appearing elsewhere on the record. If a Join or Renew action still is not offered after the related order and any pending-order indicator are resolved, check whether this membership still has a termination date and clear it here.
  • Status reasons follow the status. When you change Status, the status reason list narrows to the reasons that apply to the new status. A reason you already chose stays selected even if it is no longer in the list, unless none of the new status's reasons apply at all. Only then is it cleared.
  • Flowdown memberships protect most hand corrections, but not dates. If this membership comes from an organization's own membership, Rhythm usually protects fields you change by hand from being overwritten the next time the organization's membership changes. Date fields are the exception. They are never protected, so a date you correct by hand on a flowdown membership can still be overwritten by a later change to the organization's membership.
  • Fields tied to an order can't be changed by hand. If this membership came from an order, some fields are linked to that order. Rhythm refuses an ordinary correction that changes one of those fields.
  • Required fields still apply, even once an order-related block is cleared. If the form still will not save after you resolve a linked order, application, or pending-order problem, check for a field the form genuinely requires that is still blank, such as a field your account has marked required. That can block the save on its own.
  • An advanced, staff-only field tracks whether an order's dates and details have finished applying to this membership. It lives in an Advanced Options section on this form that only Rhythm staff can see, so account administrators cannot view or change it themselves. If a pending-order indicator on the membership record outlives the order or invoice it was describing, even after you confirm there is nothing left to pay, that field is usually why. Contact Support so they can update it directly. Support can typically do this without waiting for a separate ticket on the order itself, because it corrects the membership's own display rather than the order.

Tip

A leftover pending-order indicator, or a membership that will not save because it still points at an order that no longer exists, can sometimes be resolved with a plain refresh of the record on Rhythm's side once everything else checks out. If editing and saving the membership yourself does not clear it, ask Support to refresh the record.

  • An organization-owned membership needs a valid linked organization contact to save. If a save fails without an obvious cause, check whether the Membership Edit screen shows a blank organization contact. If it does, assign one from the organization.

  • Membership date edits follow your computer's timezone, not a console timezone setting. Even when your account has a console timezone configured, enter and read membership dates with your own computer's local time in mind.

  • Saving a membership can add many history-field changes to your account's audit logs, even when you didn't intend to change business data. Rhythm can rewrite or recalculate several history-related fields on save. A high number of logged field changes is not, by itself, a sign that something went wrong.

  • Active memberships can't carry a termination date. The Termination Date field appears only when the status is Inactive. If you change the status away from Inactive, Rhythm removes any termination date you entered when you save.

  • Status reasons follow the status. When you change Status, the status reason list narrows to the reasons that apply to the new status. A reason you already chose stays selected even if it is no longer in the list, unless none of the new status's reasons apply at all. Only then is it cleared. Changing Status to Inactive does not change Member Type for you. If the member should now show as a non-member type, update that field separately.

  • Changing a membership's status back to Active by hand is not the same as processing a renewal. It only changes the status field. It does not create an order or bill the member. If the member owes for the renewed term, process a membership order or create an invoice separately.

  • Flowdown memberships protect most hand corrections, but not dates. If this membership comes from an organization's own membership, Rhythm usually protects fields you change by hand from being overwritten the next time the organization's membership changes. Date fields are the exception. They are never protected, so a date you correct by hand on a flowdown membership can still be overwritten by a later change to the organization's membership. A manual status override can also leave a contact's membership status different from the related organization's membership status, because the correction is protected on the contact's record even though the organization's record moves on its own.

  • Fields tied to an order can't be changed by hand. If this membership came from an order, some fields are linked to that order. Rhythm refuses an ordinary correction that changes one of those fields, including the Linked Order ID. If you need to disassociate a membership from an existing or cancelled order, try clearing Linked Order ID on the Membership Info tab. If the save is refused, contact Rhythm support to remove or restore the order link instead of continuing to try it yourself.

  • A newly created membership may not save correctly if you edit it right away. Give a membership you just created, or one that just finished processing, a short pause of about a minute before you go back in to correct it. That gives any remaining processing time to finish so it does not conflict with your edit.

Warning

If you remove a chapter row right after choosing it as the member's primary chapter, the save can fail without a clear explanation. Reload the page and redo the change without removing the row you chose as primary.

If a member asks to swap out the person a membership covers, such as replacing the individual named on a benefit, there is currently no self-service way to do that. Handle a covered-contact substitution request as a manual correction here, using Edit Membership, while this remains the process for that kind of change.

Tip

If a custom field sits low on the edit page, use your browser's on-page search, Ctrl+F or Cmd+F on most browsers, to jump straight to its label instead of scrolling to find it.

Tip

While you edit a membership, Rhythm watches the record for changes elsewhere. If another user saves the same membership while you still have it open, you should see an alert with the chance to reload before you continue. Reload rather than saving over their change. Leaving the create or edit page with unsaved changes, including by the breadcrumb link or your browser's back button, also shows a warning before you lose them.

Warning

An unsaved-changes prompt after you click Save Changes, for example right after re-adding a termination date, has been observed to still save your change even if you select Cancel on that prompt. Reload the record afterward to confirm what was actually saved.

Tip

If a membership record will not save and the block turns out to be its stored auto-renewal payment information, re-saving that payment method in the Portal has been seen to clear the error and restore the ability to save the membership.

If someone is unexpectedly blocked from a restricted event registration because of their membership status, making a small change to their membership record and saving it again has been seen to refresh the eligibility data event registration relies on.

To hide a member from your association's public directories on their behalf, see Hide a Member from Directories on Their Behalf instead of using this form directly.

Where to Make Common Corrections ​

Membership Info, on the owner's own record, is where you review and change more than the obvious fields:

  • Membership origin (Principal, Flowdown, or Assigned) is one of the fields you can correct from Membership Info's edit control, both for a person's own membership and for an organization's. Use it to move a membership from Flowdown to Assigned, or the reverse. Assigned memberships can also be created directly in the console, during an organization's membership application process, or through a mass update from a query that changes the origin field for the affected records. If a set of memberships were left with the wrong origin, such as Principal when they should show as Flowdown, identify them with a query and mass update the origin field to the value they should have. This restores the flowdown indicator and lets other membership queries include the affected contacts correctly.
  • Assigned member contacts for an organization's membership are shown and changed from Membership Info too, using the same blue pencil icon. You can add or remove a contact there, or make the same correction from the related organization's own record. Being listed as a CRM organization contact is not the same as being an assigned member contact. A person appears under an organization membership's Member Contacts only after you add them there directly. If that field has a blank row with no contact selected, saving the membership fails until you fill it in or remove the row.
  • If someone was flowed down when they should not have been, correct the memberships of the contacts who should not have received it, and set the intended active member's origin to Assigned instead of Flowdown.
  • To move someone from an organization-tied membership to an individual one, disconnect the old relationship first. Terminate the person's old organization-linked membership through a billing run, or change that membership's origin to Principal when appropriate, and then create the new individual membership.
  • To separate someone from a corporate membership and let them renew on their own, open their membership in Membership Info and check the origin field. If it is still Assigned, change it to Principal. That clears the way for the portal's Join/Renew flow and the membership application to open again for them.
  • To correct a membership that ended up attached to the wrong person or organization, changing the order's own details afterward does not reattach it correctly. Cancel the incorrect order and reprocess it as a new membership application, choosing the correct owner, rather than editing the order.
  • To correct a membership bought under the wrong membership type, cancel the original order and process a new order for the correct type, so the assignment and invoice amount are corrected together. An ordinary hand correction cannot change the type on an order-linked membership.
  • To change a member's type going forward, process a membership order with the new type rather than editing the existing membership's Type field by hand. That way, Rhythm creates the matching invoice for you. If the type you want is hidden in the portal, process the order from the console instead.
  • Changing Origin from Principal to Flowdown is done the same way, from Membership Info. If the save fails, check whether the membership still has a Linked Order ID. Removing it, or cancelling an unpaid linked order first, which zeroes out the related invoice, can let the origin change save.
  • To repair a corrupted expiration or renewal that resulted from a wrong or deleted linked order, first correct the Linked Order ID on the Membership Info tab to point at the right order. Then check whether the renewal date, expiration date, termination date, and status still need a separate manual correction, because fixing the order link alone does not always fix those fields too.
  • If a renewal or application was deleted and its Application ID or Order ID are still attached to the membership, clearing those two values from the Membership Info tab lets a new renewal application be started.
  • Legacy memberships with no practical expiration date on a retired type need a real expiration date added before they can renew. While you are there, also update the membership type if the old type is being phased out.
  • A membership's Membership Number can be corrected on the individual record under Other Info, or across many records with a mass update, as described above.
  • Existing memberships with no ownership contact must be updated one at a time. A mass update of an organization's CRM primary contact role does not fill in the membership's own ownership contact field for you.
  • Legacy section participation loaded by a bulk update during implementation can behave differently from a section added through a normal purchase. It may not clear automatically the way a purchased section does, so check and correct it separately if a query still shows it after the member's other holdings have expired.
  • If a batch process such as posting fails because of an unrealistic membership term date, correcting that record's term start or expiration date to something reasonable can unblock the batch.
  • A membership order does not have to start in the storefront. Staff can also process one by creating a new membership application directly from the Membership & Committees app, which is a second way in besides the customer-facing order flow.
  • Staff can create a membership order from the console — either as a storefront order or through the membership renewal process with the chosen package — without asking the member to start the renewal in the portal. The resulting invoice still appears for the member in the portal even though staff started it.
  • If you do not want a membership to keep carrying forward a previous order's link, correct the situation by having the member go through the membership application process again rather than changing the membership's package by hand. A manual package change does not clear that history the way a fresh application does.
  • To replace the person associated with an institutional membership, it is usually easier to create or process the institutional membership for the replacement contact first, and terminate the retiring contact's membership afterward through a billing run, rather than trying to edit the existing membership in place.
  • The correction method you choose for a financial mistake has its own side effects on the membership's term. Recreating an order can advance the membership's expiration date, which may mean moving the member back to the correct term afterward. Creating a separate order just for a missed charge, such as chapter dues, avoids that expiration-date side effect but splits the charges across separate invoices. Reversing and rebuilding the original invoice keeps the charges together on one invoice without moving the expiration date. Pick the method based on which trade-off matters more for the record you are fixing.
  • There is no direct way to transfer an individual membership from one person to another within the same organization. Either cancel the original membership order, issue a credit instead of a refund, create a new application for the replacement person using pay-later, apply the credit to the new invoice, and adjust the expiration date if needed, or simply terminate the original membership and manually create a new one for the replacement person.
  • Manually converting a membership from one package to another can leave it linked to the original order from the prior package, instead of getting a fresh, standalone order relationship for the new package. That is expected, not a sign the conversion failed.
  • If you merge two contact records, the duplicate's membership application, order, and transaction history move onto the surviving contact, even when that contact's own current membership summary fields do not visibly change as a result. Check the History and Applications tabs after a merge rather than assuming nothing came over just because the summary looks the same. A merge has also been observed to lose the original Join Date when the record holding it was the one deleted in the merge, leaving the surviving record's join date showing a more recent transaction date instead. This has since been fixed, so it should not occur in future merges, but check the join date on an older merge you are reviewing rather than assuming it survived correctly.
  • Manually populating the balance-due field on an organization's membership record can be a temporary way to make it appear in a query that filters on balance due, when you already know payment is coming. A background process normally clears that balance automatically shortly after the linked invoice is paid, so double-check it after payment rather than leaving a manually entered value in place indefinitely.
  • A membership created through the join or application process, and one created manually, often need different fixes when something goes wrong. For one that came from an application, manually updating the expiration date to align it is usually enough. For one that was created manually in the first place, it can be simpler to delete that membership and have the person complete the normal join flow instead of continuing to patch the manual record.
  • If payment has already been received on account, such as by credit, but no order exists to tie it to a membership, manually correct the affected membership's fields, including dates, status, and any other details, rather than waiting for an order that will not be created.
  • To find memberships that should have dropped automatically but are still showing Active, filter a query for Active status together with the expiration-date range you expect and, if needed, the specific membership category involved. Then correct just those records rather than a broader set.
  • If a record's contact owner is blank or points to an old, no-longer-active user, that can cause an error when you try to update the membership's expiration date. Reassigning the contact's owner to a current user often resolves it.
  • If you manually save a change to a membership's expiration date while an automatic renewal update is still processing after a payment, the date can end up advancing twice: once from your edit and once from the automatic process. When you can, wait for renewal processing to finish before making the same correction by hand.
  • If a member's submission is being blocked by an address-validation problem during membership processing, a temporary workaround is to associate the contact with an organization to get past the validation, complete the membership processing, and then remove the organization link afterward once it is no longer needed.
  • To back out a membership from its application or the order that created it, cancel that order or application rather than deleting the membership by hand. See What Happens to a Membership When an Order Is Paid or Cancelled for exactly what cancelling does and does not restore. Cancellation does not always return a membership to precisely its original state, so check the result against that article rather than assuming a full, guaranteed reversal.
  • Rhythm's audit logs can also help explain why a membership's New Member flag is set the way it is. Cancelling a membership-related order can revert that flag from No back to Yes, and staff can also set it manually. If a particular record's value looks wrong, check the membership application, the deferral term, and the membership's audit history for the reason.

Ending or Suspending a Membership ​

  • To stop membership benefits for a membership that was not renewed, change the parent membership record to Inactive and enter a termination date rather than trying to suspend it another way.
  • Manually dropping a membership is the same action: edit the membership, set the status to Inactive, enter a termination date, and, if you want, exclude the member from future billing runs. Once a termination date is entered, the membership shows as terminated and is considered dropped.
  • To end an organization's own membership, terminate it through the membership termination flow, which is a billing run that drops the membership, rather than just changing the organization's record to Inactive. Changing the organization record itself to inactive does not end its membership. For dropping many memberships at once through the normal notice-and-drop flow instead of one at a time, use a billing run's drop settings. See How a Billing Run Sends Notices and Drops Members.
  • Making a contact inactive from the CRM Rolodex screen is not the same action as making their membership inactive from the membership screen, and the two can behave differently. For example, a portal login action that works after inactivating from the membership screen can error out when the contact was instead made inactive from Rolodex. If your goal is specifically to remove membership access, make the change from the membership record.
  • If a membership has already lapsed, do not just extend it in place. Terminate it properly, through a billing run or a termination date, and have the person complete a new join process so the current term and pricing apply correctly.
  • To force a contact through the join process again, such as for an honorary membership's own join flow, open their existing membership on Membership 360, edit it, change the status to Inactive, and enter a termination date. That makes them eligible for the join process again.
  • To make a membership current again after it has already been paid, remove the inactive or terminated state and let the record stand rather than creating another join transaction or invoice. This does not affect future renewals.
  • If you need to remove memberships for a large set of people so they show as non-members going forward, a billing run's drop process or a query-driven bulk delete, described above, are both faster than editing records one at a time.

If the Save Fails ​

Most save failures on this form happen because the membership points at something that no longer exists, or because another edit reached the record first.

Symptom Likely Cause What to Do 
Error mentions a non-existent object, or an "object" that cannot be found The membership still references an order that has been deleted Clear or correct the Linked Order ID on the Membership Info tab, then save again 
A foreign key or reference error naming an organization or contact The membership still points to an organization or contact record that was deleted or merged away Update the affected reference, for example by reselecting a valid contact or organization, and save again. If the reference is to a deleted organization, this is a data-integrity problem that may need escalation to Rhythm support rather than a simple field correction 
Save fails after an organization merge The parent organization's membership still references child organization or contact IDs that no longer exist after the merge Update the associated contact or organization on the membership record, then save 
Save succeeds for an optional referral contact but fails for the owner contact Rhythm can often repair a dangling referral-contact reference automatically, but a broken owner-contact reference is not repaired automatically and needs data cleanup Correct the owner reference by hand 
"This record has changed" dialog, or an error mentioning a stale or out-of-date record Someone else is editing the same membership at the same time, or you saved several fields on the same record in quick succession Reload the page and redo your edit. If this keeps happening across unrelated records, check whether more than one person is editing memberships at once 
Save fails while adding an organization membership's assigned contacts The Assigned Member Contacts tab has a blank row with no contact chosen Select a contact for the blank row, or remove the row, then save 
Membership status will not change (for example, to Inactive) The membership still has a stale linked-order reference to an order that has been deleted Have the linked order reference removed, then retry the status change 
A date correction succeeds but a pending-order or "dates have not yet been updated" banner stays on the record The banner is controlled by the membership's own Date Status field, not by the visible dates. Date Status is available only to Rhythm staff, not to you Ask Rhythm support to update Date Status on the record if the underlying order issue has already been resolved 
Save fails after updating the contact associated with an organization's membership An earlier save left a stale or deleted contact association behind Re-save the contact association on the membership, which restores the ability to save 
Adding a person under Add Assigned Member Contact while editing an organization's membership removes a chapter membership that a different, already-assigned contact had Observed side effect of saving that action together with a chapter change Check the other assigned contacts' chapter memberships after this kind of edit, and re-add any that were dropped 

Tip

If you cannot open or manage a related organization or membership record in the console at all, not even to delete it, Rhythm support may need to remove it for you rather than expecting you to complete the deletion yourself.

When Payment or Processing Didn't Update the Membership ​

Sometimes a payment or renewal completes, but the membership record itself does not move forward the way you expect. These are the situations staff run into most often. In general, once you understand what did not update automatically, you manually correct the membership's dates, status, or linked references.

  • Payment was received but the membership did not advance, or a group order's invoice paid without updating the memberships it should have. You can manually update the affected membership's expiration date and other fields. For a group order specifically, you can also cancel the order, apply store credit, and process a new group membership order so the memberships update through the normal flow.
  • A renewal payment completed, or payment data was restored, but the expiration date did not move. Manually update the expiration date once you have confirmed the payment. If a pending-order banner or stale linked-order reference is also present, clear that first, as described in the save-failure table above, because it can block the date update. If the renewal state has gotten out of sync more broadly, also check the membership's package and type, and refund any extra card payments the issue caused, in addition to correcting the expiration date.
  • If a small number of affected records show a stale pending-order banner and widespread cases keep turning up, correcting them one at a time by updating the membership's date and status details clears the banner for each record. If you find many at once, send support the affected date range and a few examples so they can review the pattern rather than clearing them one by one.
  • Correcting an expiration date on an affected record can move it out by an extra year instead of one, if the underlying payment was made before the fix for a past issue went in. Check the resulting date carefully after any manual correction like this rather than assuming a one-year advance.
  • A membership shows the correct term start date but the wrong expiration date after a renewal. This can happen when only the expiration-date calculation was affected. Correct just the expiration date back to the expected one-year date.
  • A group purchase or renewal is stuck in an incomplete state even though it was paid, and the usual options such as changing status or looking for Activate Membership are not available or do not fix it. Treat this as a case for a manual correction of the membership's fields. If the record still will not come right, ask Rhythm support about a cleanup for that specific record.
  • A duplicated renewal or approval pushed the term out too far. Manually adjust the expiration date back to the correct term end date. If the duplication also created an extra order, refund that extra order as well.
  • After you manually relink a membership to the correct order, for example because the wrong order was linked after a renewal failure, check whether the term dates, renewal date, amount paid, and total also need a separate manual correction. Relinking the order does not automatically recompute those fields.
  • A pending order or open balance banner on the record can itself be the reason a manual term update will not save. Resolving or removing the pending order first, then retrying the manual date correction, is often what unblocks it. Correcting the visible dates by hand does not reliably clear this banner on its own.
  • An open order line — for example a chapter line that failed to close — can leave the whole order open, and while that order stays open, a later membership purchase can revert a manually corrected date back to a value tied to the order. Keep a note of manual corrections you make in this situation in case you need to reapply them.
  • A manual correction to a Join Date may not show up in reporting right away. Reports that are driven by a membership snapshot pick up the corrected value only when the next snapshot runs, not the moment you save it.
  • Manually closing an order does not, by itself, finish or repair membership application processing. A record can still appear in an unfulfilled-applications query after its order is closed if the application itself was never properly activated or otherwise processed. Check the application, not just the order.
  • Manually updating the balance due on an existing membership record does not generate a new invoice for the difference. If you need an invoice for a balance change, create it separately. A membership's balance due normally clears on its own through a background process shortly after the linked invoice is paid, so it should not usually need to be entered by hand.
  • Historical Pay Later orders processed before a past fulfillment fix went in have, in some cases, been observed to remain paid but still open or unfulfilled. A fix like this is generally not retroactive. An order affected before the fix went in typically needs the same manual review and correction as any other stuck record. Check the linked order's status and, if needed, close it and correct the membership's dates by hand. Records affected by an older, already-resolved membership-update problem can be in the same situation: they are not backfilled automatically once the underlying issue is fixed, so identify and correct them the same way.
  • A declined manual renewal has, in rare cases, still been observed to leave the membership active with an extended expiration date and no matching transaction, order, or payment record. If you see this, you can still edit the membership status and dates by hand while you sort out the underlying payment. Check the account's audit logs for anything already recorded against the record.
  • If Rhythm is still investigating an issue affecting your account and support has told you it is safe to make a manual correction in the meantime, note what you changed. Occasionally, once the underlying process resumes or catches up, it can advance the same record again on top of your correction, and you will want a record of what you originally set.
  • After a failed automated activation or a failed renewal, a manual edit to the membership record — updating its status, dates, or other information — can restore access for the member as an interim step while any underlying issue is investigated further.
  • A membership that did not pick up a new paid order can sometimes be fixed by manually closing the unfulfilled order and then updating the membership's own linked order reference, in addition to correcting its dates.
  • When staff can process a membership from the backend (through Applications) but the equivalent manual-add path errors out for the same record, try processing the application instead of using manual membership creation.
  • If a completed order does not update the linked membership the way it should because of a processing glitch, manually setting the membership's expiration date and status to the correct values is a workaround. Once you have set them by hand, the membership should continue updating normally from there.
  • If an expiration date did not update the way you expected, check how the related change orders were actually processed. Compare the membership's currently linked last order against the real sequence of orders processed for it, and correct the linkage if it points to the wrong one.
  • When online reinstatement or renewal is unavailable for an organization, staff can push the membership through by creating an order in the console instead, as a temporary alternative to the self-service path.
  • If a member's expiration date shifts by a day or two right after you enter it, click elsewhere on the page to commit the date before saving, rather than saving immediately after typing it.
  • If dates on a record you are editing seem to shift unexpectedly, check that your computer's time zone matches the time zone you mean to work in before you save. Editing from a different time zone than intended can shift a date you enter.
  • Rhythm's own audit logs can help you tell whether a membership change, such as an unexpected drop, was made by a person or by automated processing. Look at who the change is attributed to, and check the related membership application, deferral terms, and audit history for context.
  • A backend error behind a failed membership update can be swallowed silently, with no error shown and no obvious sign anything went wrong. If an update seems to have had no effect and you cannot find a reason in the record's own history, treat it as a case for support instead of assuming your action simply did not take.
  • If a membership query shows a blank primary-contact field even though the organization has a primary contact in CRM, the cause is usually that no contact is assigned to the membership record itself in Membership Info. Assign the organization's contact there and save, and the query field populates afterward.
  • If a membership's linked order was cancelled and a refund has already been recorded in Rhythm, you generally cannot restore the original membership transaction in place. Process a new membership application instead. If the refund was only recorded in Rhythm and not actually issued electronically, you can instead issue a manual credit for the member to use toward the new order.
  • If you need to correct a membership that was purchased at the wrong rate, cancelling the item and issuing store credit for the full amount is the safe path. Check with support before assuming Rhythm can apply only the corrected amount and refund the remaining difference to the original card automatically.
  • Open invoices cannot be reliably mass updated to a new membership year. Even if a mass update appears to change the invoice record, the change does not consistently carry through to the invoice's own Date and Date Due fields under Invoice Options › Edit Details. Check and correct those fields directly on invoices that need a new year.
  • If you clean up incorrect billing records by hand — deleting a pro forma invoice, cancelling an erroneous order, and then manually correcting a membership's expiration date — do it carefully and check for anything still linked to what you removed. Leaving a dependent record pointing at something you deleted or cancelled is a common way to create a new, harder-to-diagnose problem later.
  • If duplicate membership records exist because of a past defect, you can delete the duplicates and manually correct the remaining record's expiration date as long as you are confident which record should stay. Treat any wider cleanup across many records as something to review case by case with support rather than as a single bulk script, because removing the wrong record can affect billing history.
  • If a mass update or manual cleanup that clears an order or date-status reference on affected records is how you plan to restore renewal eligibility, confirm first that the underlying order really is gone or cancelled. Clearing that reference is a data correction, and it is easy to do it to the wrong records if you are not confident about which ones are affected. Removing the Linked Order ID by mass update is a reasonable way to clear a lingering pending-order banner across many records, but treat it as a deliberate, documented cleanup step for the affected group rather than an ad hoc fix repeated case by case, since clearing that field is itself what determines whether the membership can be edited again.
  • Assigning a duplicate record's organization or membership to the wrong entity because of a rename or merge. If a membership or its billing order looks like it is attached to the wrong organization, check for a duplicate, renamed, or merged organization record before you correct anything else. The underlying linkage, not the membership itself, may be what needs fixing.

Activate a Membership from an Approved Application ​

When staff approve a membership application, Rhythm does not create or update the membership until someone activates it.

  1. Go to Membership & Committees › Applications, and open the application. Its status must be Under Review.
  2. Click Activate Membership.
  3. Confirm: "You are activating this membership, which will update membership dates and close out this application. This operation cannot be undone."

Result

The membership is created or updated with the application's dates and details, and the application is closed out.

Warning

Activating a membership cannot be undone. If the application never generated an order, for example because it was never paid for, activation fails, you see an error message, and the application is left unchanged. Once an application is no longer Under Review, whether it was already activated or changed for another reason, activation is refused. That means the same application cannot create or update a membership twice.

Tip

If Support has already cleared a blocking condition, such as a stale pending-order indicator, from the membership record, you may still need to come back and use Activate Membership yourself afterward to finish turning the approved application into an active membership.

If the application has an order behind it, but that order's invoice is a pay-later invoice that has not been paid yet, Activate Membership still works. It does not fail the way it does for an application with no order at all. Whether the resulting membership counts as active right away depends on how the membership package is configured. If the package is set to activate membership only after payment is received, the membership is created or updated, but the person remains a non-member until the linked invoice is fully paid. At that point, the membership becomes active based on the package's setting. Clicking Activate Membership also sets the application's own status to Approved.

Warning

Manually changing an application's status to Approved does not run this same activation logic by itself. It does not create or update the membership, and it does not send the welcome email. You still need to click Activate Membership yourself to move the membership forward. Only that action, not a manual status change, triggers activation.

The membership's welcome email is tied specifically to the Activate Membership action, not to the application's status field. If you change an application's status by hand instead of using Activate Membership, the welcome email does not go out because it is not the same automation.

The Membership Activation Confirmation email can include the member's sections and chapters through merge fields. An earlier defect kept those merge fields from resolving to readable values in the email; that has since been fixed and verified, so an activation email you send now should show the member's sections and chapters correctly.

Tip

If a membership application was refunded because it turned out to be a duplicate purchase, there is currently no setting to stop Rhythm from generating an invoice for it during application processing. Expect an invoice even on a refunded duplicate, and handle it the same way you would any other refunded invoice.

Tip

The Certification Credit query does not include membership details, so when an application decision depends on certification credits, run the Credit query alongside a membership query and compare the two to decide which applications to approve or deny.

If payment already completed but the membership never advanced or activated, such as when the invoice shows paid but the person is still shown as a non-member, you can manually update the membership's information and switch its status to Active as an immediate way to get it moving correctly again.

Delete a Membership ​

From the person's or organization's own record, choose Delete Membership from the options menu, then confirm: "This will permanently delete the membership record, and CANNOT be undone."

Warning

Deleting an organization's own membership also deletes every membership it flowed down to its people. Nothing records that a membership was deleted, and the deletion cannot be undone. If other records still refer to the membership, the delete may be refused with an error message. Resolve those references first.

Once a membership is deleted, there is no membership record left to hold a status at all, not even an inactive one. If you use an integration or report that expects an explicit status such as "Inactive," build it to treat a missing membership the same as a non-member, because a deleted membership can leave nothing to read.

Deleting a membership does not delete the contact or organization record it belonged to, and it does not remove other records such as certification credits, past applications, or past orders. It removes the membership's own information, including join date, deferral term, expiration date, membership number, and the rest of its history. Because there is no undo and no record that a deletion happened, the quickest way to recover from an accidental delete is usually to recreate the membership by hand or through the normal process. Do not expect Rhythm support to be able to restore it, because there is nothing left to restore from.

A contact record can be blocked from deletion by the same kind of dependency. If it is still linked to an existing membership record, that link stops the contact from being deleted, the same way a chapter or package still in use blocks its own deletion. The lock icon you may see on a database relationship like this represents a link to another part of Rhythm. It is not something you can remove yourself, and the underlying record must be cleared first.

If a membership on an inactive, flowed-down record is unwanted, for example because the underlying organizational relationship has already ended, deleting the membership directly from the contact's own record is one way to make that contact show as a non-member again instead of relying only on removing them from the organization.

Tip

Deleting an existing inactive membership can free up the owner to have a new membership created for them, since an owner can only hold one at a time. Remember that deleting it also removes its history, so only do this when you are sure you do not need the old record.

If deleted or otherwise missing membership data cannot be restored through Rhythm, compare against your pre-import source data or your sandbox, and recreate the missing information by hand from there.

If a related organization or membership record is corrupted or will not open at all in the console, so that you cannot manage or delete it yourself through the normal steps above, contact Rhythm support. This is one case where support may need to remove the record on your behalf.

Expected Result ​

You can create a membership by hand for someone outside the normal order process, correct an existing membership when hand corrections are allowed, turn an approved application into an active membership, and remove a membership record entirely.

Rhythm Help Center© Rhythm Software

Search article titles, settings, tasks, and troubleshooting topics. Press Enter to see results.

Browse Platform Documentation