MemberSuite Review

While core member functionality is more or less stable, and improvements are being implemented, there are many other serious issues. First and foremost, financial reporting has been exceedingly difficult (near impossible). Getting reliable figures out of the system continues to be a problem. Reports rely on different data (Orders vs. Invoices vs. Payments). If an individual pays for an order listed under the organization, reports do not clearly relate the two. Discounts frequently result in very confusing GL account listings. Lack of documentation meant early products were setup incorrectly (that is, not according the system's rules) resulting in numerous and time consuming accounting errors. While anything related to refunds or credits is so convoluted and confusing to staff and accounting that it is essentially unusable. In short, they need to hire a team of accountants to overhaul the financial programming. Next, the member portal--the outward-facing portion of the AMS--is clunky, unhandsome, and confusing. It looks to have been designed by an engineer with very little thought to actual end users. Additionally, advertised systems such as committees and member groups are so basic as to be essentially nonfunctional. One cannot set useful roles, with appropriate entitlements (that is, who gets to see what and who can edit what data), and getting to the member groups and conversations requires far too many clicks. This has meant that we have not been able to turn any of the touted member connection modules to actual member benefit. Last, the customization seems to be always ongoing. While the customer support team does its best to help, they are overloaded and cannot respond in a timely manner. They are simply receiving too many requests. Though items get fixed, it often takes weeks to months. (We were informed that several key pieces of our conference registration had been fixed and were now functioning... two weeks after we held the conference.)