A notice is a sequence, not a letter
Fellow FS here. "Send the dues notice" sounds like one action. It isn't — it's the first step of an escalation that the Order has standardized so that no member is ever surprised by a suspension, and no council loses a member without a paper trail.
Get the sequence right and most members pay early in it. Get it wrong — or skip steps — and you either lose members you could have kept or suspend someone you shouldn't have.
1st Notice → 2nd Notice → Knight Alert → Intent to Retain. Each step is a firmer message with the same easy way to pay. Payment at any step resets the member to current. Only after all four — and a genuine retention effort — does suspension come onto the table.
The escalation, step by step
The default timing below counts from the start of the billing cycle (January 1 for calendar-year dues). Your council can adjust the offsets, but the order never changes.
Dues are due for the new cycle. This is a clean, friendly reminder. The large majority of members pay here, especially if the notice is payable in one tap. See collecting dues online.
Still unpaid. A firmer nudge with the same pay link. Not yet a problem — just a reminder that slipped.
The formal delinquency notice. It makes explicit that continued non-payment puts membership at risk. This is the member's clear signal to act.
Rather than let the member lapse, the council moves him to Intent to Retain status and generates a Notice of Intent to Retain, then works to keep him. Full detail in member retention & Intent to Retain.
The instant a member pays — at any step — he's current again, and the escalation stops. There is no such thing as 'paid but still delinquent.' If your records ever show that, something is broken in how payments post.
Who you should not be escalating
Not every unpaid member belongs in the pipeline. Before a notice goes out, the member's class matters:
A member who just joined is current, not delinquent — he hasn't missed a cycle. Intake never starts at delinquent.
Members who joined mid-cycle may be waived for the first year. The notice engine should skip them entirely.
These classes are typically not billed dues at all. A delinquency notice to an honorary-life Brother is an avoidable insult.
Common mistakes
Ad-hoc notices mean some members get four and some get none. The escalation only works if it runs on a clock.
Drop a new member in at delinquent and you skip the Intent-to-Retain semantics entirely. New = current.
An unpaid balance should carry into the next cycle on top of the new dues — not vanish. Otherwise the council writes off real money every year.
The notices are the record; the phone call is the retention. Suspending without a conversation loses the member for good.
How DuesSync handles this
DuesSync runs the escalation on a schedule: current → first_notice → second_notice → knight_alert → retention, with payment at any stage snapping the member back to current automatically. New members start current, waived classes are skipped, and unpaid balances carry forward at rollover. Every notice routes through the same send path, so what you preview is what the member receives.
The result: the FS stops being the reminder system, and the members worth a phone call surface before they're lost. See the platform overview.
Built by a Financial Secretary
Stop running this by hand.
DuesSync runs your council's dues collection end to end — online payments, automatic notices, reconciliation, and the audit trail.
Free for Founding Councils through June 2027 — no council vote, no credit card.
Start free