[HCoop-Discuss] [docelic,ntk] Balances policy

[Nathan Kennedy]

I vote for it also, taking exception to the "trying to get his attention 
by disabling some subset
of his services yet to be determined," but won't make that a "no vote" 
since you left the services undetermined.

I don't think we should disable anything until there has been at least a 
month of having a negative balance.  As long as they have covered the 
deposit and we're not at risk at that point of being stuck with a bad 
debt, let's not be too harsh about this.  Partially disabling services 
at some point prior to totally kicking the deliquent member out and 
disabling everything is a good idea, but not the instant the balance 
drops below zero.

That policy would be especially unacceptable with our current situation 
of "bill-as-you-go" where we are not billing regular, fixed fees, so if 
we have some irregular expense to bill out, members are essentially 
blindsided by a charge that they cannot predict, ending up with a 
negative balance when they expected to have just a bit more than enough 
of a balance for that month's charges.

My assumption also was that while we should keep the warning emails, 
that we aren't going to _require_ any particular balance above the 3 
month deposit.

-ntk

Adam Chlipala wrote:
> OK, let's try this again, and hopefully come to a conclusion that we act 
> on this time. :-)
>
> We want to change our handling of member balances to avoid letting 
> members slip into delinquency.  After discussion on this list 
> previously, it sounds like the board might approve this plan:
>
> - Every member is required to have a deposit with us equal to estimated 
> three months' dues at the lowest pledge level.  At current pledge 
> levels, this is approximately $15, and it should go down automatically 
> when expenses stay the same but membership grows.
> - When any member's balance (now not counting the deposit) goes 
> negative, we start trying to get his attention by disabling some subset 
> of his services yet to be determined.
> - This shouldn't come us a surprise to any good HCoop citizen, because 
> every member will receive low balance e-mails for two months prior to 
> when we would freeze an account, along with the negative balance e-mails 
> that would come in the three months afterward before the board could 
> vote him out for non-payment.
> - When a member with a pledge amount set above one would be charged an 
> amount that would make his balance negative, we reset that member's 
> pledge to 1 before continuing.
> - An hcoop-announce message will proceed changing of anything visible to 
> members.
> - We give a one-month grace period following the announcement for 
> members to digest the changes and get their balances positive enough.
>
> I vote for this scheme.  docelic and ntk, your decisions?
>
> _______________________________________________
> HCoop-Discuss mailing list
> HCoop-Discuss at lists.hcoop.net
> https://lists.hcoop.net/listinfo/hcoop-discuss
>