Memberships

One membership record, whatever the source

Every membership figure in Nabu comes from one record per client membership. That record is the same whether the membership came from your connected practice-management system, an export, a CSV you imported, or a form you filled in yourself in Setup. Financials, Profitability, the Action Center and Ask Nabu all read that one record, so they always agree with each other.

Billing lines are never counted as members. A monthly dues charge tells Nabu that someone paid. It does not tell Nabu that a membership is active, and a year of dues charges is not twelve members.

Nabu keeps what your system said, in your system's own terms. It doesn't round a status to the closest-looking category. When your system uses a status Nabu can't read with certainty, the membership is marked unknown, and the figures that depend on it wait until someone can say what it means.

What each figure means

Active Members is the number of clients holding at least one membership that is active, frozen or past due at the end of the period. A client with two plans counts once.

Suspended counts memberships your system has suspended, for example after a dues payment failed. A suspended membership has not ended, so the client is still a member, but they are not counted in Active Members. They're shown separately so you can follow up.

New Members counts clients whose first membership began in the period. A renewal, a switch to another plan, or a second plan for someone who is already a member does not make them new.

Cancelled counts memberships that were cancelled in the period, on the date the cancellation took effect. A cancellation request is kept separate, because a request isn't a cancellation until the membership ends.

Membership Exits counts memberships that ended in the period for any reason: cancelled, expired, or ended at the end of a term. Cancelled is one part of it. Exits are counted per plan on the Profitability page and in the Action Center, because they are about how each plan holds its members.

Member Churn is about clients, not memberships. Take every client who held a membership that was active, frozen, past due or suspended at the start of the period. Member Churn is the share of them who hold no such membership at the end. A pending, cancelled, expired or ended membership doesn't count as held. Clients who joined during the period aren't in the starting group, so they can't churn in it. The Financials page shows how many of the starting members left next to the percentage.

Monthly membership billing is what the memberships in force are billing while their dues are being collected, as a monthly equivalent of each plan's price and billing cadence. A membership whose dues are waived, frozen, suspended or stopped adds nothing. It is a run rate, not revenue earned in the period. The Financials page shows it only when Nabu can state it completely; otherwise it's left off the page, and Ask Nabu can tell you what's missing.

Cancelled and Member Churn are different numbers

Cancelled counts memberships. Member Churn counts people.

Say a client cancels their Monthly Facial plan and starts the Annual Glow plan the same week. That is one cancellation. It is also an exit from the Monthly Facial plan, which matters when you're judging that plan. But the client never left, so they are not member churn.

The opposite happens too. A membership that simply expires is not a cancellation, but if the client has no other membership afterwards, they have churned.

So six cancellations in a period doesn't mean six lost members. It could mean six plan switches and no churn at all.

Why a figure says Not available

Not available means Nabu doesn't have enough reliable information to give you a complete, trustworthy figure for that period. It never means zero, and Nabu won't fill the gap with an estimate. A partial count shown as if it were complete would be worse than no number, because you'd have no way to tell.

Each figure has its own requirements, so some can be available while others aren't.

Member counts need a known status for every membership that could be in force. If even one membership's status is unknown on that date, Active Members for that date waits, because that membership might or might not be one of them. The same goes for Suspended.

Cancellations, exits and churn need dated history. To say a membership ended in March, Nabu needs to know when it ended, not just that it's cancelled today. If a change isn't dated, figures for any period it might fall in stay unavailable. Nabu won't guess the date.

Monthly membership billing needs to know whether each membership's dues are being collected. That's a separate fact from whether the membership is active. An active membership can have its dues waived, and a suspended one can have collection paused. Nabu can know every member's status and still not know, for a few of them, whether their dues are being collected. In that case Active Members is shown and Monthly membership billing is left off the Financials page. Ask Nabu can tell you how many memberships are missing that information. Monthly membership billing also needs a price and a billing cadence on every plan being collected.

How different sources compare

Nabu can take memberships from more than one place for the same location. They are matched by the membership itself, so the same membership seen twice is still one membership.

• A connected system's live connection tells Nabu how each membership stands right now, and when your system gives a date for a cancellation, freeze or closure, Nabu keeps that date. It doesn't tell Nabu what happened before Nabu first connected. Figures for earlier periods can stay unavailable when they depend on that history.
• A data export with status history can tell Nabu when each membership changed status. That's what lets Nabu answer questions about past periods. Before relying on an export's status codes, Nabu asks someone at your business to confirm what they mean. If your system later changes its codes, Nabu stops reading them and asks again rather than quietly changing your numbers.
• Setup and CSV. What you enter is taken as stated, including the dates you give. A membership you add yourself is yours: a later sync won't overwrite it.

When two sources disagree about a membership, Nabu uses the one that is more reliable for that detail. A dated status history is preferred over a snapshot of today, for example. The other source's answer is kept on record, so nothing is thrown away.

Adding memberships yourself

You can add a client's membership in Setup, under Clients, or import many at once with the Client Memberships template in the same section. For each membership Nabu needs:

• the client (the template matches clients by email) and the plan;
• the status: active, pending, frozen, past due, suspended, cancelled, expired, ended or unknown;
• the start date.

A status that did not apply from the start needs the date it began. A cancelled membership needs its cancellation date, a frozen one the date the freeze began, and an expired or ended one its end date. Otherwise Nabu can't place the change in the right period.

Optional details make more figures available:

• Recurring dues (collecting, suspended, frozen, waived, collection error or stopped), with the date it applies from. Without it, Monthly membership billing can't include that membership. Leaving it blank means you haven't said, not that nothing is being collected.
• Auto-renew and next billing date.
• Member price override when a member pays something other than the plan's price.
• Sold date, end date, and an opening balance with its unit and date.

Each plan needs a recurring price and a billing cadence for Monthly membership billing. A plan without a price shows no price, not $0.

Common questions

Why isn't my suspended member counted as active? Their membership hasn't ended, but it isn't active either. Usually a payment has failed and your system has paused the membership. Nabu counts them under Suspended so they don't disappear. They aren't churned unless they end up with no membership in force.

Why did someone who switched memberships not count as churn? Member Churn counts people. They left one plan and joined another, so they're still a member. The plan they left shows an exit on the Profitability page.

Why can Nabu show Active Members but not Monthly membership billing? They need different information. Active Members needs each membership's status. Monthly membership billing also needs to know whether each membership's dues are being collected, which some systems don't record for every membership. When that's missing, the Financials page leaves Monthly membership billing off instead of showing a partial number. Ask Nabu "why isn't recurring billing shown?" and it will explain what's missing.

I had six cancellations. Why isn't member churn six members? Cancellations count memberships during the period. Member Churn counts the clients who were members at the start and have no membership left at the end. Someone who cancelled one plan but kept or started another hasn't churned. Someone who joined and cancelled within the same period wasn't a member at the start, so they're a cancellation but not part of churn. The page shows how many of your starting members left, so you can see what the percentage is based on.

Why isn't Nabu estimating the missing memberships? An estimate would look exactly like a real figure, and you'd have no way to tell them apart. Nabu shows a number only when it can stand behind it.

Why is historical churn unavailable for my integration? Churn for a past period needs to know which memberships were in force at its start and its end. If your connection only reports how memberships stand today, Nabu has no record of earlier dates until it has watched them change. An export with status history, or dates entered in Setup, fills that in.

Why is a membership showing when its sale looks unusual? A membership comes from your system's record of the membership itself, not from its sale. A membership can be real while its sale is still open, was discounted, or was recorded differently. Nabu keeps the membership and doesn't treat the invoice as proof it exists.

Does Nabu guess unknown membership statuses? No. A status Nabu can't read with certainty stays unknown, even if it looks like one Nabu does know. The same goes for dues collection states. The figures that depend on it say Not available until someone confirms what the status means.

Is membership revenue on this page? No. The membership figures describe your members, not your accounting. Membership dues collected and membership credit used are in the Financials reconciliation. Nabu doesn't yet calculate recognized membership revenue, the value owed to members, benefit value or member lifetime value. Those need accounting rules that aren't in place yet. Membership economics, such as plan and member profitability, cost to serve and member spend, comes in a later release, after Nabu's shared revenue and cost definitions are in place.