Membership
Membership renewals for a professional association
A professional association renews members annually, offers different membership grades with different fees, and gives members access to a resource library. Lapsed members lose access automatically, and renewal reminders go out at sixty, thirty and seven days.
Automatically generated draft
Written by machine against our own engineering playbook. The company is invented; the decisions are the ones we would make on a real build. A reviewed blueprint goes further — nine sections, agreed line by line, and it is what the build is tested against.
Section 01 · What has to work
Members can pay their annual dues across varying grades and immediately retain access to the resource library without manual intervention.
Section 03 · Screens
Every screen, and what it is for.
- ›Directory — admins view all member records, filter by status, and update grades instantly.
- ›Member Portal — members view their current grade, pay annual dues, and download resources instantly.
- ›Resource Library — authenticated members browse documents and stream secure files instantly.
- ›Invoice History — members view past payment receipts and download PDF invoices instantly.
Anything not on this list is not in version one. That is what keeps a fixed price fixed.
Section 04 · The data model
What it stores, and who can read a row.
members
id uuid, email text, name text, grade_id uuid, status enum(active, lapsed, pending), joined_date date, created_at timestamptz
Access · Admins read all rows; members read only their own row.
grades
id uuid, name text, annual_fee numeric(10,2), description text, created_at timestamptz
Access · Anyone authenticated can read all rows.
resources
id uuid, title text, file_url text, min_grade_id uuid, created_at timestamptz
Access · Members read rows where their grade level meets or exceeds min_grade_id.
invoices
id uuid, member_id uuid, amount numeric(10,2), due_date date, paid_at timestamptz, status enum(unpaid, paid, void), created_at timestamptz
Access · Admins read all rows; members read only rows matching their member_id.
Those access rules belong in the database, not in the screens. Someone who edits the address bar still cannot read a row that is not theirs — and the test that proves it blocks delivery if it fails.
Section 05 · States
unpaid → paid → lapsed | void
Most scope arguments three weeks into a build are really arguments about a state nobody named at the start.
Section 06 · Where this breaks
What bites products like this one.
Payment gateway webhooks fail to deliver, causing active members to lose library access unfairly.
Store raw webhook payloads and implement an idempotent reconciliation job that retries failed invoice updates nightly.
Time zone drift causes reminder emails to fire at incorrect local times for international members.
Store all scheduled reminder timestamps in UTC and evaluate daily cron triggers against strict calendar boundaries.
Section 08 · Deliberately left out
What version one does not do.
- ×Automated prorated upgrades mid-cycle — complex edge cases in fee calculations; add in v2 when tier-switching volume demands it.
This is the section that protects the date, and the only place in the document where somebody says no. It is also why clients trust the rest of it.
Still open
What we would ask before quoting.
- What payment gateway are we integrating with for processing annual membership fees?
- Should lapsed members retain read access to their past invoice history, or lose all portal access entirely?
Half of this already exists
Renewal Engine
The billing half of this is a solved problem: recurring charges, a retry ladder on failed cards, access cut and restored automatically.
It is one of our pre-built products: the code is handed over to you, adapted to your own wording and rules, and the rest of the specification above is built on top of it rather than from scratch.
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