Many Expert clients are registered as incorporated societies – we specialise in providing software for membership associations - and in 2022 changes were made to the Incorporated Society Act which could affect these clients.

The following are key requirements for maintaining member records that must be adhered to:

• The name of each member — both current and former members
• The last known contact details of each current member
• The date on which a person became a member (if there is no record of the date they joined, societies can state ‘Unknown’)
• For former members, the date that they ceased to be a member within the last 7 years.

We’re very pleased to advise that MoST complies with these requirements in the following ways:

• When a member joins, the database is updated with a joining date and a created date
• If they are added to the database manually, a ‘created date’ is recorded
• When someone is ‘terminated’ a terminated date is added to their record.

MoST site administrators need to heed the following:

• In your own processes, you would need to ensure you don’t delete members, instead use ‘terminated’.
• You need to ensure you don’t remove contact details of a member. If a member removes their own information for some reason, this would be recorded in the logs. If you want to remove details from a record, this information should be recorded in the notes of the profile.
• You would also need to ensure you don’t replace a member’s detail with someone else’s. Though again, this would be recorded in the logs of that record.