MemberTies™
Contributor: In-house

What MemberTies™ does
The following section describes MemberTies in more detail. The following application description has been carefully scrutinised and edited by us and is based heavily on information generously provided by Myrro International, the developers of MemberTies.

Installation
The installed program requires about 21 Mb of disk space, and may be easily uninstalled via the Windows Control Panel.

Protecting Your Data
All data is stored in a password protected relational database, and full backup and restore options are included within the program.

Help
Comprehensive online help is provided using the standard Windows help system. Help includes a table of contents, a complete searchable index, and step by step procedures for using all available features.

Contact Information
All essential contact information is available to organise including: complete name; photograph; company name; address; email; telephone; website; occupation/job title; reference; etc. In addition, MemberTies Professional allows for unlimited addresses per membership record, and allows you to assign a date range within which each address is valid so the system can automatically keep track of the 'current' address.

Membership Types
Most clubs are made up of many members, and each member is assigned a particular 'status' that designates the type of membership the person holds. MemberTies ships with a predefined set of statuses, but also allows you to add, delete them, or define your own. So regardless of whether your club has statuses like 'Family' and 'Single' or more generic terms like 'Prospect' and 'Regular', MemberTies will let you set up exactly what you need.

Dues Payments
MemberTies enables you to enter any number of dues payments for each membership record. MemberTies (standard version) lets you enter the amount and date paid, the membership status purchased, and additional comments. Once you have set up your dues information, you can also use the Dues Calculator to calculate the amount of dues owed for a given status for a given month.

MemberTies Professional expands the standard version's dues functionality to give you individual dues 'accounts' to which you can post both debit and credit entries using a system of dues Posting Types. The pro version also provides automated interest posting on past-due accounts, and mass dues-posting to help with those 'once a year everybody owes us the same amount' tasks. Additional reports are also included to help check balances, postings for a given day, and to print account statements.

Roles & Achievements
If your club recognises members for their achievements, tracks offices or positions held, or just needs to know when someone was involved in a particular type of activity, you can record it using membership or club 'Items'. Items are used as a generic way of describing all of the 'things' your members can be involved in. You can create distinct item categories, such as 'Member Achievements' or, 'Offices', and then assign items to those. For example, in the Offices category, you might create items of 'President' and 'Vice President . You could then assign the Offices/President item to the person who held that position, and add a comment indicating the year they were in office.

ToDo Lists
Every busy club has things that need to be done. Sometimes the ToDo is related to a specific member, and other times it is more generic. Sometimes you (the user of MemberTies) needs a reminder just for yourself. The ToDo List feature in MemberTies enables you to track ToDo items for any membership or club record, or for yourself. You can print your outstanding ToDo list, display future items, and mark them as done as you complete them.

Other Clubs
If your club is part of a larger parent organisation, you might want to keep contact information about other clubs in the organisation Taking this a step further, MemberTies enables you to assign each membership record to any number of clubs. That means you can actually keep track of the membership of several clubs and run reports specific to a particular club's membership, or for all members combined.

Reporting
No membership system is complete without reports, a complete set of predefined reports is provided including: rosters; mailing labels; dues payments; statistics; birthday lists; contact lists; individual member and club reports; and more. Many reports can be customised to show only certain membership statuses, dates, etc., or can be restricted to limit membership records to those assigned to a specific club. Custom reports may also be created for your organisation that fits your particular needs.

MemberTies Professional adds the ability to create multi-column reports, as well as mailing labels, rosters, directories, and business/ID cards. Choose from any available membership or club field, lay out the report, save the report, and it will act as if the report shipped with the original program.

In-house Review
The following review is based on working with MemberTies at AbleStable® on a daily bases:

As creative professionals used to high-end products like Dreamweaver and Photoshop we were very impressed with MemberTies. We hunted high and low for a software solution that would track membership details in a flexible and user-friendly manner. When we came upon MemberTies we have to confess we were a little hesitant in trying it out as we'd not heard of it before. We spent a long time reviewing the developers site before eventually deciding this might fit our requirements.

From the moment we installed the software we knew I'd made the right decision. MemberTies installs in a very clean manner, more than can be said for most software products, including the large high-status software houses. We automatically run a comprehensive system check after every new software installation and usually have to fix a few problems, either as a result of poor registry entries, or shortcut omissions. MemberTies installed without a single reported problem. We mention this as it sums up the care and attention that's been given to all aspects of this programme.

MemberTies ships with great on-line, pop-up and status bar help. We later discovered the developer also worked as a technical writer and it shows. So often the help sections with software are either sparse, or poorly written, but the plain language and great examples used in MemberTies help provide the user with an invaluable resource in getting up to speed quickly, and before long we started exploring the true potential of MemberTies with the help of some excellent walk-throughs.

The software itself is very intuitive to use and evidently developed by someone with a great eye for detail and a particular understanding of the needs of organising people profiles. Changing MemberTies to our needs couldn't have been simpler (the speed of this process was all down once again to the excellent help section).

We've no reservations in recommending MemberTies Pro. You'll be getting a lot more than the price tag suggests. One final but significant remark: the support of the product is every bit as good as the product itself! All in all five out of five stars....