Initial Setup

To get the most out of MemberTies, it's important to get some basic things set up before you begin entering records. The information below is designed to help you through this setup process.

There are several default values, lists, and settings that will help simplify the process of entering records later. The following list covers the most import things to check:

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Each time you create a new membership record, the state/province and country are set automatically (though you can change them). The default state is (None), and the default country is United States. You should change these values to match the majority of your membership. See Maintaining State/Province Codes and Maintaining Country Codes.

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Each phone number on a membership record must be a particular "type" of number. For example, in major cities, some people have a "Metro" number that people can use to avoid long distance charges. Other examples are "Cellular", "Pager", "Fax", or anything else that describes a phone number. The default is "Normal". The phone type is displayed on roster reports when the phone number defined as something other than "Normal". To change the default Phone Type, see Maintaining Phone Type Codes.

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Each membership record has a field called "Reference," in which you can record the method by which a person found out about your organization. The options you can choose are called "Reference" codes. The default is "Unknown". To create more options, or to pick another default, see Maintaining Reference Codes.

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Categories and Items are used together as a way to assign awards, titles, achievements, or other miscellaneous "stuff" to membership and group records. A typical category might be "Officer", and a typical item under that category might be "President". You don't have to use this feature -- they aren't defaulted anywhere for you -- but if you want to create some now, see Maintaining Categories & Items.

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Custom Fields are fields that you can name and use for anything you like. There are 12 fields available to membership records, and 12 fields available to group records. Each field can have its own name, and can be displayed as a freeform text field or a dropdown. You can even set certain rules about the field, such as to make it required. To set up the names of your fields, or to define dropdown lists specific to the fields, see Maintaining Custom Fields.

•	Locations are used with any activities you create. Each activity has to take place somewhere, and MemberTies refers to these places as "Locations." By default, a location called "Undetermined" is already available, but you can add more at any time. See Maintaining Locations.

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Membership Statuses are an extremely important area for customization. The system comes preloaded with a selection of statuses that may or may not match the way your organization works. Statuses are essentially classes of membership. Preloaded statuses include Regular, Couple, Alumni, etc., but you can create your own called "family", "newbie", or whatever.

When you create statuses, you will also be able to set up dues information and other important characteristics including the default status to be used for new records. Statuses drive a lot of processing in MemberTies, so it is worth taking time to decide how you want to set them up. See Maintaining Status Codes for complete details.

If you run a report, you'll see that the organization name displayed at the top is simply, "Your Organization." Unless we were very lucky, that probably isn't the actual name of your organization. Therefore, you need to tell MemberTies what name to use instead. The name setting is found in Preferences -- a place you can tweak all sorts of program settings. See Organization Preferences for complete details.

Note: If you have a registered copy of MemberTies, you probably have a license applied to the database you are using. In that case, the name is obtained from the license and cannot be changed. See Registering for more information if you need a license.

Some other preferences you might want to look at right away are the Report Preferences. These enable you to set the kind of "tag line" you would like at the bottom of all of your reports, and other report settings. (The tag line might be something like, "Please contact the Membership officer with changes to this information.")

Sooner or later you will want the administrator password. When you log in as the administrative user you will have some special menu options under the Tools menu that let you do things like create new databases, check, repair, and optimize tables, and create new users. By default, the administrator account has a user name of "mtadmin" and a password of "password." It is strongly recommended that you log in as the administrator at some point and change the password to something a little more secure!

If multiple people will be using MemberTies, you may want them each to have their own user name and password so you can tell who has changed which records. See Working with Users for complete details.

Now you have set up defaults, built lists, organized your statuses. You are now ready to add membership records! As you do so, remember that you can press F1 on any window to display the Help for that window.

If you run into problems, first check the Troubleshooting/Q&A section of this help file to see if your question has already been answered. If you don't see your question, check the Help index for related topics. If all else fails, check the Frequently Asked Questions page on our website (http://www.myrro.com/memberties) or contact support with your question.