Two jobs on the Maintenance Tasks screen affect records across your Rhythm account: reprocessing flowdown for every organization and generating estimated historical membership snapshots. Use this article to decide when to run each job and what happens after you start it.
Before You Begin
Prerequisites
- You need the Maintenance Tasks permission, which comes with the Membership Administrator role.
- Reprocessing flowdown and generating snapshots affect every organization or membership in your Rhythm account, and neither job asks you to confirm before it starts.
Reprocess Flowdown
When an organization holds a membership, people connected to that organization can inherit, or “flow down,” from the organization’s membership. This happens when the organization’s membership type has flowdown turned on.
Flowdown normally updates after each individual change. Some setup changes affect every organization at once, such as turning flowdown on or off for a membership type, turning on cascading so flowdown reaches child organizations, or changing which contact roles qualify. After one of those changes, use Reprocess Flowdown to calculate flowdown again for every organization in your Rhythm account.
You can also run it when a membership query looks incomplete or out of date. For example, run it if a contact was just made a primary contact but has not appeared in query results yet.
Reprocessing assigns the correct membership type and package, and it keeps inherited membership details aligned. An inherited membership’s expiration date always follows the organization’s expiration date. Its status follows the organization’s status unless you already corrected that field by hand on the individual record.
- Go to Setup › Maintenance Tasks.
- In the Reprocess Flowdown card, click Reprocess Now.
Result
A message tells you reprocessing has started, and Rhythm emails your address when it finishes queuing the work for every organization.
Warning
That email means Rhythm has queued the work for every organization. It does not mean each organization’s flowdown has finished updating. Reprocessing continues afterward and can take a while, depending on how many organizations and members your Rhythm account has. The screen can also lag slightly behind the data, so Rhythm may have recognized a record’s change before the flowed-down membership visibly updates.
If reprocessing fails partway through, Rhythm does not email you. The completion email only goes out for a successful run. If you never receive the completion email and flowdown still looks wrong after a reasonable wait, check the affected record’s last-updated information to see whether the change actually landed. If it still looks wrong, contact Support. In some cases, Support may need to correct an affected membership directly while the underlying cause is investigated.
Clicking Reprocess Now sometimes returns an error message, including a timeout, even when the job finishes successfully behind the scenes. Treat an error message here as a reason to check whether your changes took effect, not as confirmation that nothing happened.
Tip
Clicking anywhere in the Reprocess Flowdown row starts the job, not just the button. Avoid clicking the heading or guidance text more than once while you wait.
After a flowdown configuration change and reprocess, open an affected membership to confirm the change took effect. Check whether it still shows the note explaining that it flowed down from its organization.
Does Flowdown Reprocess Automatically After an Import?
Yes. After a data import finishes, Rhythm automatically calculates flowdown again for every organization, so you do not need to click Reprocess Now. If that automatic run fails, nothing on this screen or elsewhere tells you. If you think flowdown did not update correctly after an import, run Reprocess Now yourself to be sure.
A Contacts/Memberships custom data import that updates membership fields depends on values Rhythm recognizes. For example, Membership Type must exactly match one of your Rhythm account’s existing membership types. A value Rhythm does not recognize can make the import fail for that row. If an import task fails, check that every membership-related value in your file matches an option that already exists in Membership setup.
Generate Historical Membership Snapshots
Rhythm automatically captures a snapshot of every membership on the first of each month, so reports can show how membership changed over time. Once Rhythm records a month’s snapshot, that snapshot becomes a fixed, point-in-time record. Later membership edits do not change what an existing snapshot already shows.
A newly set-up account has no past snapshots to show. Perform Snapshot Lookback creates estimated snapshots for the past 60 months from your current records, so reports have a history to start from.
Because the lookback estimates the past from today’s records, it does not recreate true prior history that was left out of your data migration. That includes earlier membership cycles, expirations, or lapses. If your reports need to reflect that history accurately, plan to bring it over during migration or ask Rhythm about adding it afterward.
What Flowdown Does and Does Not Carry to Add-Ons
Reprocessing flowdown copies add-ons from the parent organization's own membership record to each qualifying member. If an add-on was purchased on an individual contact's own membership instead of on the organization's record, that add-on does not flow down to anyone else, and reprocessing will not change that.
If flowdown for an organization still looks wrong after reprocessing, check the organization's own membership record. Flowdown copies that record's status, dates, and Date Status down to every qualifying member, so an incorrect Date Status on the organization's own membership carries through to everyone under it. Correcting the organization's Date Status with a mass update, then running Reprocess Now again, can restore the correct status across its members.
Warning
Changing a package's setting for when a payment updates the membership's dates — from an amount- or percentage-paid threshold to updating immediately, for example — shortly before an order processes can keep that specific order from picking up the new setting correctly. That can then show up as a flowdown discrepancy for the organization's members. If you change this setting, avoid doing so while an affected order is in flight, and reprocess flowdown afterward if anything looks out of step.
Generate Historical Membership Snapshots
Membership keeps a monthly snapshot of your membership so reports can show how it changed over time. Rhythm generates that month's snapshot automatically at 05:00 UTC on the first day of every month, for every membership in your account, so you do not need to run anything for the regular monthly snapshot. A newly set-up account has no past snapshots to show, though. Perform Snapshot Lookback creates estimated snapshots for the past 60 months from your current records, so reports have a history to start from.
- Go to Setup › Maintenance Tasks.
- In the Perform Snapshot Lookback card, click Perform Lookback.
- Wait for the confirmation message. The button shows it is working until the job finishes.
Result
Rhythm reports that the lookback ran successfully, and estimated snapshots now exist for months that did not already have one.
Warning
Run this only when you first go live. The lookback estimates the past from what your records look like today, not from what they actually looked like at each past date. A month that already has a snapshot is never overwritten, so running the lookback again does not change months you already have. However, any month with no snapshot is still filled in from current data whenever you run it, whether that is at your first go-live or much later.
Tip
Add Snapshot Lookback to your go-live checklist. It lives on the Maintenance Tasks screen rather than in setup, so it is easy to overlook. If you skip it, your historical reports have no starting point until you come back and run it.
Leaving the Maintenance Tasks page, or moving to another page, does not stop either job. If you navigate away during a lookback, its completion message may appear later on whatever page you are on when it finishes. Closing the browser tab stops you from seeing the message, but Rhythm keeps running the job.
Expected Result
Flowdown across your Rhythm account reflects your latest configuration, and your reports have a starting history of monthly membership figures to work from.