Getting started

Getting your members into Tidy is an important first step in setting up your organisation. Below we'll explain how to get your members from your old system set up in Tidy.

Before you're ready to import, there's a few of things to have ready:

Contacts in your contacts list, grouped appropriately, ready to import. If you're starting from scratch, you'll need to create or import contacts, you can read more on the contact importing process or you can learn more about groups if you need to.
A membership level, ready to import to... more on membership levels.
If you're importing existing active memberships, and you want to carry the dates over to Tidy – you'll need a date custom field.

Before you "Go Live"...

We recommend importing your current memberships, duplicating your existing system, so that once you go live, your members will be able to renew in-place. But there's a few special considerations.

Check your visibility settings

It's often best to set the level's visibility to Admins only until you're confident the import is complete and correct.

Double-check your date field data

If you're importing existing membership dates using a custom date field, it's worth auditing that data in your CSV before you import. A date that's off by a year can result in memberships immediately expiring — which will trigger emails to every affected member if the relevant Member Messages are enabled. Run a quick sanity check on your date column (especially the year) before hitting Import.

Deactivate expiry and renewal messages

The import wizard lets you control whether a Welcome Email is sent — but expiry notices and renewal reminders are not affected by that setting. If these are enabled on the membership level, they'll fire automatically based on the membership dates you're importing. If your date data includes memberships that are already near or past expiry, affected members will receive those emails immediately.

Before importing, head to Member Messages in the membership level settings and review — or temporarily disable — any expiry and renewal notifications. Re-enable them once you've confirmed the imported dates look correct.

Don't duplicate financial records

Instead, temporarily zero out the membership price in the membership level settings for the import. Afterwards, set the price back to normal again.

Importing Members: Steps

Head over to memberships, Click on the Green New Button and select Bulk Import from Group.

Please note that TidyHQ does not currently support bulk import from group into a Family Membership.

Complete the bulk import form

Select the From Group you'd like to import from
Select the To Membership Level you'd like to import to
Is this Membership a renewal?
This setting allows you to renew existing memberships. For example, Jordon has an existing General Membership ending on 03 May 2018 – if he's imported, and the 'Renew' box is checked, it will add a membership to his existing record – his new end date (we add 12 months - the length of the membership) would be 02 May 2019. If 'Renew' is not selected, existing memberships will be ignored - the end date will not be updated and new memberships will be applied to contacts without memberships as usual.
Select when you'd like the Membership to start
The default start date is, 'today' (for rolling memberships), or the start state specified in the membership settings (for fixed memberships). Custom start date allows you to apply a unique start date to each membership based on Custom Field data that's stored on a contact's profile.
Select custom if you're importing existing active memberships from an old system. Note: you'll need to have imported the membership dates during the contact import.
If required, Select your Custom date field to apply date from
Note: only 'date type' custom fields will be displayed in this list.
Select Payment status
Marking the membership as paid will record a deposit under Finances which you'll be able to see under the Finances > Transactions table.
Awaiting payment allows you to send an invoice to the member that they can pay when they're ready. You can customise Invoices under Organisation Settings > Finance Settings.
Note: this option will only be displayed if the membership has a price.
Payment type
Select a payment type to keep your transactions well documented.
Note: the transaction reference will be recorded as the membership name.
Send membership welcome email after import
Allows you to send or not send the membership welcome email. To find out what the welcome email looks like, check it out under the membership level settings.

Select Import, wait for the process to finish – success!

Review: head over to reports and check the details

After you've successfully imported your members, you can double check all the data was imported correctly by checking out the Reports tab.

Select the membership level
Review the report - you'll be able to check the status and dates from here. If you have any questions about status, learn more here.