Page 27 - ABF Newsletter December 2024

Here’s an example of a membership renewal email generated by the club in myABF to be sent to a player:
On the Auto pay date, if all goes through, payment will be made which means neither the player nor the club needs to do anything. Just like a table money fee or a congress entry, the charge goes to the play- er’s account and a credit goes to the club’s (later settled by the ABF to the club in the same way as happens now). All the transactions appear in both the player’s and the club’s bridge credits statements. Plus there are detailed reports available to the club to follow up who has and hasn’t paid, etc.
WHAT IF I DON’T WANT MY MEMBERSHIP PAY- MENT TAKEN THAT WAY?
No problem. Firstly it can only happen if:
• The member has signed up with their own myABF account (members without their own account can’t use Bridge Credits in the first place).
• The member has sufficient funds in their account at the time (or has auto top-up enabled).
Secondly players now have an area in their profile pages about their membership(s) and can make var- ious choices – one of which is to opt out of Auto pay for club membership fees.
Simply untick the Auto pay fees option on the far right for the club(s) in question. You can then make your membership payment outside myABF in what- ever way you previously have. [You can still choose to pay with bridge credits – but just do so manually at a time of your choosing rather than have the au- tomatic payment collection mechanism operate.]
What else can a player now do?
1. You can choose to share personal data (email, phone, date of birth) from your myABF profile to your club’s membership record. Remember your profile is in your myABF account – it’s your data not your club’s. But you can elect to share some of that infor- mation to make things easier – otherwise your club membership record will be separate and, invariably, things will get out of sync over time.
You can choose to always share that data (so any future changes you make to your profile will auto- matically update your club membership record as well) or to do so just once (so the data at the time is copied to your club membership record but sub- sequent changes won’t be) or not to share it at all (in which case the two records remain completely separate as they are today).
2. You can block a club that has listed you as a member. Note this is NOT the same as resigning your membership (that would be handled in the normal way and the club would update its member list). This is simply indicating that you think there is an error and you weren’t a member of this club in the first place. Clubs can add players to their membership list in myABF but there have been some occasions where they added someone by mistake. This gives the players visibility to which clubs are listing them as a member in myABF. A notification is sent to the club if a player does this and their membership is removed. You can of course unblock a club later if you wish.
By the time you read this we hope several clubs with 31 December membership year ends will have sent out their annual renewals and perhaps some pay- ments will have already been made. Welcome to the next generation of managing bridge club member- ship!
As usual please contact myABF support or your local myABF champion for more information. Some webi- nars have already been run about Release 6.0 and more assistance and training is planned.
Julian Foster, myABF Manager julian.foster@abf.com.au
Australian Bridge Federation Ltd. Newsletter: December 2024
Page 27