A SaaS product with limitations for large associations
We recently migrated to Impexium after using a long-time enterprise AMS. This is a fairly new startup company with a small staff. Since they are still in their start-up phase, you will not find a robust help system, technical documentation (table and field descriptions and relationships), a user group to lean on for support, or 3rd party developers or products. These are all things we used like crutches in the old AMS and are missing them now. If you are moving from a system where this was never a necessity, then this would not be an issue for you.
Our requirements included the ability to develop queries and variations of queries but we found that Impexium’s query builder is extremely limited. The standard Impexium invoices and receipts cannot be modified per client and we’ve had to build reports that act as invoices and receipts which are available only to staff users, thus defeating some of the ‘self-service’ functions for members. If you are ok with standard invoices and receipts out-of-the-box, then this again would not be a problem for you.
Because the system is SaaS, we lost the ability to use SQL triggers such as automatically doing a proration calculation for dues on an order, and automatically totally up a field composed of several other fields. We now have to pull out our calculators to do simple tasks. If you never had the luxury of triggers or stored procedures then this also would not be an issue.
We find that the UI for members, which is really the same as for staff, is not meeting our needs and we are already needing to build a custom solution that will be more user friendly for our members. Yes users can pay online which is great for simple dues, but not so great when dues are supposedly being paid by a different org. If your small association is based on individuals with a simple dues system then perhaps the UI would suit your member needs.
There appears to be no way to generate mass orders on companies who are eligible to be members but do not currently have an active membership on the record. This means that if a member expires, the mass invoicing will not produce an order and invoice automatically. To be fair, there may be some workaround for this that is not apparent yet.
The system is so slow that membership service staff needs to write down any member data changes while on the phone and actually make the changes later. But SaaS is slow, so we are told.
In Impexium, an email address must be completely unique, not in the system at all. This is probably fine for most organizations, but it causes some difficulties for members who are ‘companies’ and use generic email accounts by function such as accounting@company.com with specific individuals moving in and out of the position.
If you are a large trade association, have complex dues or invoices, if you want to customize the web experience, or if you need to be able to create mid- to advance-level queries, this is not the best option for you. If you are a small organization, based on individual memberships with simple dues and can’t afford one of the big systems, this might be worth a demo.
