Memberships and admissions: the half bindro does, and the half you keep doing

What does bindro actually do with a membership?

One thing, at one moment: when a visitor types a membership number at checkout, the engine looks it up on your roster and, if it is current, prices their admission at the member rate for that admission type. The lookup happens on the server inside the transaction that takes the money, so a stale page cannot buy a member price and a revoked number stops working the moment you revoke it.

Everything else a membership scheme involves — selling one, renewing it, taking a recurring payment, printing a card, chasing a lapse — happens somewhere other than bindro. That is a deliberate limit rather than a gap waiting to be filled: the payout engine settles per delivered event, so recurring membership revenue is money the platform could take and could never pay out to you.

How do I put members on the roster?

By hand, in the console: a name, a membership number and an optional expiry date, one member at a time. There is no CSV import and no API for it in the console's own screens, so a scheme with several hundred members is an afternoon of typing, and a new member joining today is a job somebody has to remember to do.

Only the hash of each number is stored, which is why the roster lists names and never numbers. That means the page cannot hand a working member number back to anyone who reaches it — including you — so correcting a typo is re-adding the member with the right number, which also transfers the membership to whoever holds that number now.

• A number under four characters is refused: a guessable reference is a cheaper admission for anyone who notices the box exists.
• Revoking is immediate and one click; the roster shows current, lapsed and revoked members distinctly.
• An expiry date is optional, and a blank one means the membership never lapses on its own.

Should a membership be a season pass tier as well?

If your members get in free, yes — and it is a different mechanism from the member price, which is worth understanding before you publish either. A season pass is an admission type marked as a pass: it is bought through the ordinary checkout at the ordinary price, and the credential it issues admits its holder once at every session of that event rather than only at the slot it was sold against.

The two do not talk to each other. Selling somebody a season pass does not add them to the member roster, and putting somebody on the roster does not give them a pass. A museum that wants both — free entry at any slot AND a member price on the special exhibition — has to do both, and the passes and the roster stay in step because you keep them in step.

What happens when a membership lapses or changes hands?

Nothing automatic, which is the thing to plan around. There is no sweep that emails a member before their expiry date, no renewal notice, and no report of who lapsed last month. An expired number simply stops unlocking the member price, and the visitor sees a message on the membership box telling them the reference could not be found as current — which is where a lot of front-desk questions will come from if your renewals run elsewhere.

A pass already sold is unaffected by anything you do to the roster: it is a credential on an order, and it keeps admitting at its event's sessions until that event ends. Revoking a roster entry stops future member-priced bookings and does not reach back into a pass someone already holds.

What still has to live in your membership system?

The scheme itself. Joining, renewing, taking the money for a membership, cards, gift memberships, household members, upgrade paths and the mailing list are all outside bindro, and a gift card cannot stand in for a gift membership — a card is spendable value, not a place on the roster.

What bindro gives that system is a reliable price at the door and a record of who actually came: attendance is counted per session from scans, and the quarterly board report separates free places from paid admissions, which is usually the number a membership scheme is judged on.