This person or company has an application in a pending state and won't be added to the Kavi Members 'person' or 'company' tables unless the application is approved. A moderator or administrator may edit information in the pending application, or may handle any required billing or moderation processes to expedite approval.

There are several reasons why a company that exists in the database may not appear on the Company Representative Signup form. Only active member companies that haven't opted out of being displayed on the form will be available. If the company is inactive or has opted out, it won't be displayed.

If accepted domains are enforced for the Web site and a member company is added without any accepted domains, the company will not appear on the signup form. To remedy the situation, simply add accepted domains for this company and the company will become available on the signup form immediately.

Kavi Members Admin Tools that include a search feature are affected by the size of the database that has to be searched and the amount of the data that is retrieved and displayed. This especially applies to tools for managing or reporting on users.

The larger the number of users in the organization's database, the longer it takes to search through all that data. The effect usually doesn't present any issues beyond a mildly annoying slowdown in performance until the number of users in the database approaches 100,000. When it reaches this level, searches may occasionally time out, especially if the site is processing a heavy load from some other source, such as a large email attachment moving through a mailing list (which is why Kavi recommends posting large documents to a document repository and sending a link rather than an attachment...but I digress). Company and membership data can also be unwieldy, though this is less common.

Admins can optimize tool performance by narrowing search operations to retrieve just the information that is actually needed. The extra time you take to set specific search criteria that returns a leaner, more refined data set can easily be recouped by the reduction in tool response times. An Admin running an extensive search operation can inadvertantly create such a drain on system resources that it affects other users on the site, so it is good to make this practice a habit.

The duration of a membership is the length of time that a membership lasts, regardless of start or end dates. The term of a membership is the range of dates during which a membership is current.

There are three types of membership durations: 'Fixed Dates', 'Fixed Duration' and 'Lifetime'. Here are examples of each to help illustrate the distinction between duration and term.

See also Membership Setup.

Administrators can store this information for any membership that is eligible for renewal.

The time it takes to perform a batch upload is directly dependent on the quantity of data being uploaded. The larger the data file, the more time it takes the Upload Data tool to validate all that data. Each field in the data file is validated as thoroughly as possible to help ensure a safe upload process and minimize the chances that the upload will corrupt the database.

The Upload Data tool responds with this error message when it encounters a single quote (') in a data file contains, such as when a name contains an apostrophe. The data field that contains that single quote must be escaped by enclosing the data string in double quotes. For example, if the data field contained a company named:

You'd place the double quotes around the entire data field (and not just around the part with the single quote), like this:

This is a known file format compatibility issue that people sometimes encounter when using the Upload Data tool. There is a simple work-around for this problem: use the universally compatible .csv (Comma-separated value) format instead. If you are using the Upload Data tool, you can download the file in .csv format and save it locally. Open OpenOffice Calc then open the .csv file, which will automatically open properly for you. You can export the file back to .csv format when you save your changes, since the Upload Data tool requires this format.

If you aren't using the Upload Data tool, see this same procedure will work as long as a .csv version of the file is available. If someone using Excel wants to send you a spreadsheet, they can export the file to .csv. You can edit the file and also export it to .csv to work around the compatibility issue.

There are some spreadsheet applications that remove leading zeros from the values in a column that has been interpreted as containing integer values. This most commonly occurs with postal codes.

If this happens to you, you have two options: you can use a different application, or force the application to allow you to manually re-add the zeros.

Bills are never deleted, even if the billed membership is deleted or replaced.

Organization Admins can copy the 'Public Membership Status Page' link and paste it into an email so the recipient can use the link to view the Membership Status page and pay their bill.

Behind every report is a database query, so the time it takes to run a report is directly affected by the amount of data that is searched and retrieved by the query. The larger the data set being queried (the larger the number of companies and users the organization has in its database) and the broader the query results (all companies or users as opposed to a select group of companies or users), the more time it takes the database to process the query.

The best way to minimize the time it takes to generate a report is to narrow the results by setting the search criteria so the report retrieves just the information you actually need.

An activity history is designed to provide a human-readable overview of changes to user or company data, and is generally the quickest and easiest way to get information that will allow you to review the type of change that occured, when it occurred and the entity driving the change.

When you require highly detailed and technical information about data changes, it sometimes becomes necessary to examine the Full Activity Log for information that isn't available in more readable formats. This might include the names of the specific database fields that were changed and the new field values.

Some reports need to include fixed search criteria so that a certain set of data is always preselected for the report. For example, many organizations have reports that retrieve a list of primary contacts. To create a Primary Contact Report, the 'Contact Type' field would be fixed and set to the value of 'Primary Contact'. You don't want to be able to change the value of this field because the whole purpose of the report is to retrieve information about primary contacts.

In this Primary Contact Report example, the 'Contact Type' field would be the only fixed field, but the report could include many 'searchable' fields. The values of searchable fields can be set by Report Admins when running a report. Fields must be searchable if they are needed to create meaningful reports for the organization. Primary email addresses are very important for Primary Contacts, so this should be a searchable field. Company Name is another example of a field that would be searchable in this kind of report.