Membership & Payments

The Membership & Payments platform lets your organisation sign up members, collect membership fees, and take donations online — through Square, with money settling directly into your own Square account. It adds a member register for admins, configurable membership tiers, public donate and join pages on your organisation's website, a self-service member portal, and automatic emailed receipts.

:::info Opt-in feature The entire membership, donation, and payments bundle ships switched off for new organisations. It is enabled per-organisation via a MEMBERSHIP_PLATFORM feature flag, flipped on by your WildTrack360 administrator. If you don't see the Members or Payments sections in the Admin Panel, the feature has not been enabled for your organisation yet — contact your administrator. :::

Overview

The platform has four parts:

• Members register (/admin/members) — admins manage member records, contact details, status, and joined date, with CSV import/export.
• Membership tiers — the named membership levels (their prices, billing interval, and member benefits) that members can join.
• Public pages — no-login Donate and Join pages served on your organisation's own subdomain.
• Member portal (/portal) — where members sign in to manage their membership, donate, view their impact, carry a digital membership card, and download receipts. See the Member Portal guide for the full member-facing experience.

All payments run through Square. Each organisation connects its own Square account, so funds settle directly to you. WildTrack360 collects a flat 5% application fee on each payment; no money flows through the platform and there are no manual payouts. Members and donors can optionally cover the fees so your organisation receives 100% of the intended amount (see Cover-the-fees below).

Members register (admins)

Open Admin Panel → Members. The register is a sortable, filterable, paginated table of every member in your organisation.

Managing members

• Add a member — capture name, email, contact details, status, and the date they joined.
• Edit — update any field, including the joined date (useful when migrating historical members).
• Archive — members are archived rather than deleted, preserving history.
• Status — each member has a status (for example active, lapsed, or archived) that reflects where they are in the membership lifecycle.

CSV import & export

• Export downloads your full member list as a CSV.
• Import lets you bring members in from a spreadsheet. Download the sample CSV first to see the expected columns, fill it in, then upload. The importer validates rows and reports any problems before committing.

Custom member fields

Admins can define custom fields for members under Members → Fields. These extra fields appear on the member form and on the public join form, so you can collect the information your organisation needs (emergency contacts, interests, and so on) without code changes.

Linking carers to members

Organisations that already use WildTrack360 for wildlife care can link existing carers to member records, so the same person can sign in to the member portal, receive receipts, and pay membership fees without re-entering their details. Your administrator can run a one-off backfill that creates a linked member for each active carer.

Membership tiers

Open Admin Panel → Members → Tiers. A tier is a named membership level with:

• A name and optional description
• A price
• A billing interval — choose One-off, Monthly, Annual, or Lifetime per tier (previously every tier was a fixed annual commitment). Annual and monthly tiers auto-renew; one-off and lifetime tiers are charged once.
• Member benefits — an ordered list of short benefit lines (for example "Quarterly newsletter", "10% off events"). These appear as a checklist on the public join form and in the portal membership picker, so prospective members can see exactly what each tier includes.
• A GST handling setting
• An active/archived flag controlling whether it appears on the public join page

Only active tiers are shown to the public and to members in the portal. Archiving a tier hides it from new sign-ups without affecting existing members.

:::tip Starter tiers If you're setting up for the first time, the onboarding checklist (below) offers a one-click Add starter tiers action that creates a sensible Supporter / Family / Lifetime set you can then edit. :::

Public donate & join pages

These pages are served on your organisation's public subdomain (for example your-org.wildtrack360.com.au) and need no login.

Page	URL	Purpose
Donate	/donate	One-off donation with an instant emailed receipt
Join	/join	Become a member by choosing a tier and paying

The join form shows your active membership tiers and any custom member fields you've configured. Both pages only work once your organisation has connected Square (see below); until then they show a friendly "not set up yet" message.

You can also generate embeddable Donate / Join buttons from Admin → Payments → Settings to place on your existing website.

Member portal

Members sign in at /portal to manage their own membership. The portal includes a dashboard, membership management, donations, an impact view, a digital membership card, household management, EOFY statements, a news feed, and a message inbox.

See the dedicated Member Portal guide for the full member-facing walkthrough.

Payments, receipts & billing (admins)

Open Admin Panel → Payments for a record of every payment and donation taken, with access to printable receipts.

Connecting Square

Open Admin → Payments → Settings → Square, then Connect Square account. This starts a secure Square OAuth flow; once connected, payments settle into your Square account automatically.

:::note Australian compliance Collecting an application fee in Australia requires the platform Square account to accept Square's Payments API Application Fee (PAAF) Product Disclosure Statement and Financial Services Guide. This is handled at the platform level, not by individual organisations. :::

Receipts

Every successful payment mints a sequential receipt number and emails a receipt to the payer automatically. Admins can reprint any receipt from the Payments register. Receipts use your organisation's registered/legal name and the thank-you messages configured in Organisation Settings.

Recurring memberships & donations

Annual memberships and recurring donations are self-billed: the member's card is securely vaulted on your Square account, and a scheduled job charges it each cycle. After repeated failed charges, the subscription and its memberships are automatically cancelled, and admins and the member are notified.

Admin payment notifications

Admins receive email notifications of payment activity (new payments, donations, and renewals) so finance and membership staff stay in the loop without watching the dashboard.

Cover-the-fees

Both donations and membership joins/renewals can offer the payer an optional "cover the fees" toggle on the public and portal forms. When ticked, the charge is grossed up by roughly 7.2% (the 5% platform fee plus Square's Australian online card fee) so your organisation receives 100% of the intended gift or membership amount. The payer sees a clear breakdown of the extra amount before paying, and donations remain tax-deductible.

For memberships, the grossed-up amount is stored as the recurring subscription amount, so every future renewal continues to cover the fees automatically — there's nothing else to configure. The amount charged is always derived on the server from the tier's configured price, so it can't be tampered with from the browser.

Gift & complimentary memberships

Admins can grant a membership to any member without taking payment — useful for offline gifts, raffle prizes, grants, sponsorships, or comped memberships. From the member roster, use the Gift membership action:

• The membership is activated immediately (and a lapsed member is reactivated).
• The system records who granted the gift for your records.
• The recipient is emailed a welcome message, and their digital membership card shows "A gift from …".

Household (family) memberships

A member on a household/family tier can add secondary household members from their portal membership page. Each secondary member:

• Gets their own active membership status and their own digital membership card.
• Signs in with their own email address and self-claims their place in the household.

The primary member manages the household (adding or removing people) from the portal. This lets one paid family membership cover several people without separate payments.

Membership lifecycle & renewal emails

A scheduled job runs once a day to keep membership statuses accurate and to nudge members at the right time:

• Expiry — memberships whose paid period has ended move to Expired.
• Lapse — members no longer covered by any active membership move to Lapsed.
• Renewal reminders — for one-off annual memberships, reminder emails go out 30, 7, and 1 day before expiry.
• Lapse notice — sent when a membership expires.
• Win-back emails — sent at roughly 30 and 90 days after lapsing, inviting the member to rejoin.

Auto-renewing (recurring) memberships are billed automatically and so are not sent renewal reminders. Every email is sent exactly once per membership and stage, so members are never double-emailed even if the job runs more than once.

:::note Operations This runs as a daily server-side scheduled task (around 02:15 UTC). Members and admins don't need to do anything — statuses and emails are handled automatically. :::

EOFY tax statements

At the end of the Australian financial year (1 July – 30 June), donors and members often need a consolidated tax-deductible donation statement:

• Members self-serve their own annual statement from the portal payments page and can print or save it as a PDF.
• Admins get a Tax statements view under Admin → Payments → Statements showing per-donor totals for a chosen financial year, with a printable statement for each donor.

Statements use your organisation's registered/legal name and ABN, so make sure those are set in Organisation Settings.

Member communications

When the platform is enabled, admins can communicate with members directly from WildTrack360:

• News feed — publish organisational announcements at Admin → News. Published posts appear in every member's portal News feed, and the first time a post is published it is emailed to members. (Editing a published post does not re-send the email.)
• Member messaging — select members from the roster and send a personalised message. Messages support merge tokens — {{firstName}}, {{orgName}}, {{animalsHelped}}, {{animalsReleased}} — rendered live against your organisation's real impact stats. Messages land in the member's portal inbox and can optionally be emailed.

Members read news and messages in their portal — see Member Portal → News & messages.

Member → carer interest

Members who'd like to become volunteer wildlife carers can express interest from the portal. Admins triage these applications under Admin → Carer interest, moving each one through a status (New → Contacted → Approved / Declined) and, when approved, linking through to full carer onboarding. This turns your membership base into a recruitment funnel for carers.

Admin onboarding checklist

When you first turn the platform on, a "Set up your membership program" checklist appears on the Members page with progress indicators and deep links. It tracks the key setup steps:

• Square account connected
• ABN set (for receipts and tax statements)
• At least one membership tier created
• Public join page live (organisation URL set)
• Members imported
• A welcome news post published

The checklist is dismissible and hides itself automatically once everything is complete. It also offers the one-click Add starter tiers action mentioned above.

Permissions

Membership and payments are governed by new permissions:

Permission	What it allows	Roles
member:view_all	View the full member register and onboarding status	Admin, Coordinator (all species)
member:manage	Create, edit, import, and archive members; grant gift memberships; publish news; message members; triage carer interest	Admin
membership:configure	Manage membership tiers and payment settings	Admin
donation:view	View donations and payment records	Admin, Coordinator (all species)

See Roles & Permissions for the full matrix.

For administrators: setup checklist

1. Have your WildTrack360 administrator enable the MEMBERSHIP_PLATFORM feature for your organisation.
2. In Organisation Settings, set your registered/legal name, ABN, organisation URL, and donation/membership thank-you messages.
3. In Admin → Payments → Settings, connect your Square account.
4. In Admin → Members → Tiers, create your membership tiers (or use Add starter tiers), set each tier's billing interval, and list its member benefits.
5. (Optional) Define custom member fields under Members → Fields.
6. (Optional) Publish a welcome news post so new members have something in their portal.
7. Share your public /join and /donate links, or embed the generated buttons on your website.

:::tip Follow the in-app checklist The onboarding checklist on the Members page walks you through these steps with live progress and deep links, and hides itself once setup is complete. :::

:::tip Scheduled billing Recurring charges and Square token refresh run as scheduled jobs on the server. Your administrator configures these as recurring tasks — members do not need to do anything; renewals happen automatically. :::