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Two optional charges sit on top of a membership price: VAT, and a one-time registration fee paid when someone first joins. Both are off until you turn them on, and both are configured per membership level rather than once for the whole organisation. Tax on manual invoices is separate and is set on the invoice template.

Turning them on

SettingsPayments & FeesMembership feesPricing Options. Requires ADMIN_TENANT.
These two switches are authoritative. With Enable VAT on Fees off, a price that already holds a VAT rate is charged and invoiced with no VAT at all, and every invoice line is issued as non-taxable. Turning the switch on later starts applying the stored rates immediately, so check your prices before you flip it.
Pricing Options section of the membership fee settings with Enable VAT on Fees and Enable One-time Registration Fee switches

Setting a rate per membership level

Once VAT is on, each membership price on a fee product gains a VAT block:
  • VAT exempt (not taxable): the level carries no VAT and is excluded from the taxable base.
  • VAT rate (%): used when the level is not exempt. Decimal rates are stored as written, so 13.5 or 19.6 are fine.
That is how one organisation charges VAT on a standard membership and none on a reduced or honorary level: they are separate prices, so they carry separate treatments. Donation options on a fee product never show the VAT fields, and neither does any product that is not a fee product.

VAT is added on top

Orgo uses the exclusive model everywhere. The price you type is the net amount, and VAT is calculated on top of it:
A level priced at 100 with a 19% rate charges 119. Nothing in the product is VAT-inclusive, so do not enter a gross figure and expect Orgo to work backwards from it.

The one-time registration fee

The registration fee is a joining fee: it is a field on the membership level, and it is charged once per member, on their first membership payment. The field carries the note “Charged once, on the member’s first membership payment. Leave empty for no registration fee.”
“First payment” means the member has never had a membership validity date. A member who paid once and then lapsed for years counts as a returning member and is never charged the registration fee again. There is no way to re-arm it for an individual short of clearing their membership history.
Other things worth knowing:
  • It is only available on organisation-level fee products. A local center fee product does not show the field.
  • It has its own VAT treatment, set independently of the price VAT. Those controls appear only once you have entered a registration fee amount, and only when Enable VAT on Fees is also on.
  • It is recorded as its own payment row and appears as its own invoice line, so reports separate joining income from recurring dues. It rides on the same card charge as the first membership payment, but it stays a separate row: Refund in Orgo returns only the row you act on, so refunding the membership does not return the joining fee. Refund both rows, or refund the whole charge in the Stripe Dashboard, which marks both refunded in Orgo.
  • It buys no membership time. Only the membership portion extends the member’s validity date.

What the member is charged

At checkout the member sees one total built from up to five parts: The membership summary card, the fee cards and the card payment panel all compute this the same way, so the amount on the button matches the amount on the card form.

VAT on an invoice

Membership invoices carry VAT per line, not once for the document. Each line stores either a rate or an exempt flag at the moment the invoice is created, so a historical invoice keeps the treatment that was correct on the day it was raised. Changing a price or a template later never rewrites an issued invoice. The invoice shows a VAT column per line, then a totals block with Subtotal, one VAT row per distinct rate (labelled with the rate and the base it was applied to), Total and Amount due. Line amounts and VAT are rounded to two decimals. When at least one line is exempt, the invoice prints the VAT exemption note, which is the free-text wording that states the legal basis for the exemption.
The exemption note is stored on the invoice template and copied onto invoices Orgo generates itself for membership fee payments. It is not copied onto invoices you raise by hand, and there is no field for it in the invoice template form or the invoice form. It can only be set through the API, on the template (for automatic invoices) or on the individual invoice. If you need it on your documents, ask support to set it for you.

Tax on manual invoices

Manual invoices take their tax from the invoice template rather than from a membership price. SettingsPayments & FeesInvoice templates, ADMIN_TENANT. The template’s tax name and rate are copied onto an invoice when it is created from that template. Create one template per tax treatment and issue each invoice from the one that matches it.

Your organisation’s VAT number

The VAT identification number printed in the issuer block of every invoice comes from SettingsOrganisation infoVAT Number. It is a display field: Orgo does not validate it and does not use it to decide whether VAT applies.