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Built for organisations who take money from people outside their membership. A contact has no login, no password and no member profile, and can still pay you for almost everything you sell. Donations, event tickets, invoices and recurring subscriptions all work with a contact as the payer. There is exactly one thing a contact can never hold, and it is the thing people most often assume they can. The Payments and Subscriptions card on a contact record, listing four donations with amount, a paid status, date, product and a one-time type, and a record payment button

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A contact can never hold a membership fee

Membership fees belong to members and to companies. A contact record has no fee validity date and no membership status, so no payment made by a contact can ever put them in good standing. A fee payment records a member as its payer.
The practical consequence is simple. If you need any of the following for a person, that person has to be a member, not a contact:
  • a membership validity date and an active or lapsed status
  • the renewal ladder and its reminder emails
  • membership inherited from a company
  • inclusion in the paying-members figures on Insights
Turning a contact into a member is a separate job with its own rules about what moves across. See Becoming a member.
Do not sell a membership fee product to an address that is not a member. A fee purchase made from an email Orgo cannot match to a member does not become a fee record. Take fee money through the member’s own account, or use Mark as paid on their Fee tab. See Recording a payment made outside Orgo.

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Money follows the email

Every checkout in Orgo resolves its payer the same way, whether it is a donation page, an event ticket, an invoice or a Stripe charge.
1

Look for a member

The payer’s email is matched against members in your organisation. A match books the payment to that member.
2

Otherwise look for a contact

No member match, so Orgo looks for a contact with that email in your organisation.
3

Otherwise create one

No contact either, so a contact is created there and then, stamped with the source that produced it (Donation, Event or Stripe), and the money is booked against it.
A payment from a complete stranger is therefore never orphaned. It arrives with a contact record attached to it. This is why your contacts list grows every time you run a public campaign. One safeguard is worth knowing. When the email does match an existing member, an anonymous public checkout is not allowed to rewrite that member’s name or their stored identity details. Only that member, signed in, can change them.

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What a contact can pay for

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Where a contact’s money shows up

On the contact record. The Payments & Subscriptions card holds a subscriptions table and the same payments table used on member profiles, plus an Add payment record button for money taken offline. The button only shows for organisation-wide financial managers. Choose what it was for with Payment type (see Recording a payment). In your organisation-wide lists. A contact payer appears in the payments list and in the invoice list exactly like a member, shown as a link back to the contact record rather than to a member profile. Permissions differ by action, and the server enforces them regardless of what a screen shows you. A chapter-level financial or HR permission on its own is not enough to open a contact’s payment history. That list is an organisation-level view. To see only one kind of money across everyone, including contacts, use the Payment type filter on the organisation-wide Payments list: Fee, Donation, Event ticket, Shop or Admin. The contact’s own card has no such filter.
A contact with any payment, invoice or signed document attached cannot be deleted. Deleting one directly is refused, and a bulk delete skips it and reports how many it skipped. The money records would be left without a payer.

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Recurring payments by a contact

Recurring works. A contact can hold a subscription, the card is charged every period, and each charge is written as a payment against the contact and shows on their record.
Renewal notice emails are sent for subscriptions owned by members. A contact on a recurring donation or subscription is charged every period without receiving one.
Plan for that. Say on the donation page how often the card will be charged and how to stop it, and check the subscriptions on the contact record when someone queries a charge they did not expect.

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Donations that count towards membership

A contact still never holds a fee. But if your organisation has Donations count towards membership switched on, a donation a contact made is judged like any other when it is paid. When that contact is later merged into a member, the member’s membership is worked out again with those donations included. See Donations.

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Company membership

A contact can be added to a company and given any of the company roles, including Primary Contact, and can carry a joined date. They appear in the company’s Team Members panel and link back to the contact record. A contact consumes one of the company’s seats. The seat allowance comes from the plan the company bought, and a contact row counts against it in the same way a member row does. What a contact does not get from the company:
  • Membership validity. When the company pays, its valid-until date is copied to members who have an account. A contact has no fee date to receive, so it is skipped. A contact inside a fully paid-up company is still a non-member.
  • Any company power. Roles held by a contact are stored and displayed but grant nothing, because company permissions are exercised by signing in and a contact cannot sign in. A contact who is the Primary Contact cannot administer the company, edit it, or manage its payments.
Note the current behaviour of the company screen: Remove and the role controls on the Team Members panel act on member rows. A contact attached to a company cannot be removed from the company or given a different role from there, while still counting toward the seat allowance. Company mechanics in full: Companies.

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Refunds

Refunding a contact’s payment is the same job as refunding a member’s, with the same button, the same permission and the same result. The money goes back through Stripe, the payment is marked refunded, and any event tickets bought with it are cancelled so the places return to sale. The only difference is what a refund unwinds afterwards. A member refund rolls their membership validity date back. A contact has no validity date, so there is nothing to roll back and nothing happens. A refund on a contact-payer invoice marks the payment refunded and stops there.

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Reporting: the figure that misleads

This one costs people a board meeting.
  • Revenue totals include money paid by contacts. Every successful payment counts, whoever paid it.
  • The paying-members count does not. It counts members with a membership fee period covering the date being reported. Contacts are excluded, and so is every purchase that is not a membership fee.
So dividing revenue by paying members does not give you average revenue per paying member. In an organisation with a busy donation page or public ticket sales, the two numbers describe different populations and the result can be wildly overstated. Use revenue by product type, or the Finance tab, when you want to understand where money comes from. See Insights.

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Troubleshooting

The payer used an email address that does not match their member record, so the member lookup missed and a contact was found or created instead. The payment stays where it was booked. Merging that contact into the member moves their payments, subscriptions, invoices and identity records across. Create user account does the same thing, but only when your organisation creates admin-made accounts as Active, which is the default. On that setting the matching contact is folded into the new member and removed. On any other setting the contact is left behind with the money still on it. A person who later registers with the contact’s own email is folded in automatically once they confirm it. Merge Records is the reliable route, because it shows you what will move before you commit and can be undone. See Becoming a member.
Check whether the payer is a member or a contact. A payment booked to a contact never produces membership validity, whatever was bought. If they should be a member, make them one and record the fee on their Fee tab.
Contact rows in a company count toward the seat allowance, and the Remove and role controls on the Team Members panel act on member rows. If the company needs more room, the seat count comes from the plan it bought, so a plan with more slots raises the allowance.
Expected. Payment type is a label for filtering. A contact can never hold a membership fee, and even for members only a real fee period recorded from the Fee tab moves a validity date. See Recording a payment.
Expected behaviour. Renewal notices are sent for member-owned subscriptions. The charge itself is recorded normally and appears on the contact record.
A payer who completes checkout without giving an email cannot be matched to anything, so a fresh contact with no name and no email is created for each payment. Ask for an email on the checkout if you want payers to accumulate on one record.