Accepting new memberships and recurring donations through Beacon forms works seamlessly; you get a new membership record, a new subscription record, and payments all link automatically behind the scenes.

But what about your existing recurring donations and memberships?

Below we'll take you through both your initial set up, as well as ongoing imports. If your recurring payments are through Stripe or GoCardless, use our in-built templates for your initial set up, and then new payments will be imported and linked automatically.

Before reading on, be sure to have a read through our article on import templates to familiarise yourself with a few of the concepts.

If you have previous recurring subscriptions in Stripe or GoCardless that you'd like to store in Beacon, you're in luck! Our integration means that any new payments can be linked to their subscriptions in Beacon and be imported automatically.

To start, you will need to import your previous payments, and also set up the subscriptions. Then, any new payments will get passed into Beacon without any manual processes!

All done!

Finito!

Importing recurring donations is slightly more involved than individual payments. There's a few things that need to happen to be able to have accurate, usable data to report on going forward.

There are 3 key records need to be created or updated from your imports:

Additionally:

Phew! That's a lot of pointing... Let's take a look at it in a bit more detail.

If you would like to regularly import payments from an external provider, you will need to have information about both the individual donations (the Payments in Beacon), as well as the overall donation schedule (the Subscription in Beacon).

For example, you need to know that Samson gave £10 on the 3rd of June, and also that he gives £10 every quarter.

Often, these are in two separate spreadsheets/reports, but occasionally may also be in the one sheet.

The key ingredient to make it all work is an ID that will stay static for this person's giving.

Tilly gives £15 monthly, and every payment is linked to the same ID; TK421, which is different to anyone else's ID.

You will need to do two import templates - One for the subscription information, and one for the payments themselves.

Create a new import template, for the Subscriptions record type, mapping any information about the regular giving to the relevant fields. For example:

Map your unique ID to the 'External ID' field on the Subscription.

As you would with other imports, you can also set 'Fixed data' for all of these subscriptions. For example:

For deduplication, use the 'External ID' for Subscriptions and the person's email address for People.

Create a new import template, for the Payments record type, mapping any information about the transactions to the relevant fields. For example:

Map your unique ID to the 'External ID' field on the Subscription. Note: Payments also have an 'External ID' field!

As you would with other imports, you can also set 'Fixed data' for all of these payments. For example:

For deduplication, use 'External ID' for the Subscriptions and the person's email address for People. For the payment, use the 'External ID' (if you had a payment ID for payments) or simply leave blank - we want this to create new payments so it's ok not to deduplicate!

Going forwards, you'll still want to import both spreadsheets each time you're reconciling your donations. This will catch new donors, as well as changes to the subscriptions (like cancellations / amount changes).

Importing memberships can be tricky! There's a few things that need to happen to be able to have accurate, usable data to report on going forward.

There are 4 key records need to be created from your imports:

Additionally:

Phew! That's a lot of pointing... Let's take a look at it in a bit more detail.

To get your memberships set up in Beacon, you will need to have information about both their membership itself (Membership in Beacon), their payment schedule information (Subscription in Beacon) and the membership fees that have been paid (Payments in Beacon).

For example, you need to know that member 65132, Samson, has a Platinum membership that started on the 10th of February this year, which he pays £50 annually for. He paid on the 1st of February by card.

Often, these will be in two or sometimes three separate spreadsheets/reports.

The key ingredient to make it all work is a unique ID that will stay static for this person's payments. Usually, this will be the member number.

Tilly pays £15 monthly for her membership, and every payment is linked to her membership number; 3487, which is different to anyone else's member number.

You will need to do three import templates - One for the membership details, one for subscription information, and one for the payments themselves.

Create a new import template, for the Memberships record type, mapping any information about the membership to the relevant fields. For example:

Duplicate your member number with a smart column (e.g. ={{{Member number}}} ), and map to the 'Member number' field on People, via the 'Member' field.

As you would with other imports, you can also set 'Fixed data' for all of these memberships. For example:

For deduplication, use the 'Member number' for Memberships and 'Member number' for People.

Create a new template, for the Subscriptions record type, mapping any information about the payment schedule to the relevant fields. For example:

Map your member number to the 'External ID' field on the Subscription. Duplicate your member number twice with two smart columns (e.g. ={{{Member number}}} ), and map to the 'Member number' field on Memberships via the 'Membership' field, and People via the 'Payer' field.

As you would with other imports, you can also set 'Fixed data' for all of these subscriptions. For example:

For deduplication, use the 'External ID' for Subscriptions, and the 'Member number' for both Memberships and People.

Create a new template, for the Payments record type, mapping any information about the transactions to the relevant fields. For example:

Map your member number to the 'External ID' field on the Subscription (via 'Subscription').

As you would with other imports, you can also set 'Fixed data' for all of these subscriptions. For example:

For deduplication, use the 'External ID' for Subscriptions and the 'Member number' for People and Memberships. For the payment, use the 'External ID' (if you had a payment ID for payments) or simply leave blank - we want this to create new payments so it's ok!

By far the easiest way to manage your memberships in future is to encourage any members that need to renew to do so via a Beacon membership form. Payments and subscriptions will update automatically, saving you time and effort!

Simply turn on 'Allow members to use this form to renew their memberships?' on your form, and members can enter their member number to renew their next membership or change to recurring payments going forward. See this section of our guide.

No, you can tailor it to your needs.

We've been quite specific to encourage successful imports, but since Beacon is a very flexible product, you can change things as you see fit.

As an example, you could add extra fields for People like address, phone, how they heard about you, etc. when importing.

The key is to still use your unique ID to link the record types together when you import. If you're familiar with importing, and how the data in your database relates to each other, feel free to make changes to the process.

Yes, it will simply mean that some of your records will be incomplete.

e.g. If you don't have the frequency for the subscription, your payments will still import correctly, will still link to the subscription, you just won't be able to see this record if you were filtering for all 'monthly' subscriptions, for example.

The key pieces of data you can't do without are the ID fields (External IDs or Member numbers), and the amount of the payments. Outside of those you'll simply have a few holes in your data.

Nope! As long as you have the IDs to correctly link your records in Beacon, you can have your data in separate sheets. In fact, it's often easier!