Have you organised your 2024 OCA membership yet?
Our renewal process is well underway, but you can also purchase a membership yourself through the website.
The OCA now has close to 500 members! Each year, our General Secretary launches a renewal process for all our members.
We have tried a number of different ways over the years to improve this process - from a straightforward invoice renewal of the past year’s members, to sending out quotations hoping people will confirm, to asking people to come forward if they wanted to renew their membership. We’ve learnt it works best if we renew the previous year’s members directly through invoice which is what we have done again this year (if you haven’t received your new invoice for 2024 and were expecting it please email Rebecca here and she will look into it for you).
The governance of the OCA is made up of 3 different groups: we have Members, Delegates (Members who have the voting rights in the Association) and Board Members. Our members are individual people, but it is common that the company where the member’s work pays for the membership of a number of their employees, to massively help support the OCA.
To manage the memberships, we use the Membership standard Odoo module.
But native membership management for organizations (if a company wishes to pay for the membership of several of its employees) was not very well developed in Odoo standard code.
It was possible to enter an associate member who carried the membership. This led to display problems on the website, as well as complex management of membership invoicing.
In response to this problem, Graeme Gellatly wrote a module that enabled membership to be invoiced on the invoice line with the link to the partner concerned.
This also made it possible to enter a different membership for each member, thus distinguishing between members, delegates and board members.
The PR was in draft until recently as we wanted to test it out by doing this year’s membership to check its viability - so far we think it is working well! It is available here: https://github.com/OCA/vertical-association/pull/151
Finally, the native membership module doesn't work properly when there's a year for which membership has been cancelled. In this case, the member's membership status is cancelled even if he pays his membership the next year. This was also causing problems with the display of members on the website.
To solve this problem, we decided to use the OCA module:
Although this module adds other functionality that we don't use, it does allow us to calculate a correct membership status.
If we want to continue improving the process all the way, we need to be able to manage the membership of organizations directly on the website. This would require the ability to enter the relevant member on each membership line on the website. At present, Rebecca, our General Secretary, has to enter each organization member manually.
This small blog post shows how the OCA organization contributed to the OCA code in order to make our administrative work easier. But as always, there is room for improvement for the next Membership renewal round in 2025!
NB: any member who wants to be shown on our members directory will need to complete this survey. Once your payment is reconciled you will be published.
NB: any member who wants to be shown on our members directory will need to complete this survey. Once your payment is reconciled you will be published.
