ChapterDues
Book a walkthrough

About the author

Jimenez Julien, the person behind ChapterDues

I build software for volunteer officers who inherit a chapter's books for a single year and are expected to leave them better than they found them.

Portrait of Jimenez Julien

Publication director, MLJ, SASU. Reachable directly at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.

Why I built a product for chapter treasurers

The first chapter I ever helped had 154 members, a checking account at a local bank and a treasurer named Ellen who had been a partner at an accounting firm for nineteen years. She was not confused by ledgers. She was defeated by the fact that the roster she was billing against did not match the roster the membership chair was recruiting against, and neither of them matched the list the national office held. She spent an August weekend reconciling three spreadsheets so that a $140 dues notice could go to the right 154 people. That weekend is the reason ChapterDues exists.

What I learned quickly is that chapter work is not amateur work. The women who run these organizations are attorneys, surgeons, school principals, controllers and business owners. They are extremely good at their jobs and they apply the same standard to the chapter. What they do not have is time, continuity or a tool built for the shape of the problem. Commercial association software is priced and designed for national bodies with paid staff. Consumer payment apps have no concept of a member category, a dues year or a term of office. So chapters fall back on spreadsheets and goodwill, and goodwill does not survive a June handover.

The shape of the problem is turnover. A chapter treasurer holds office for one year, sometimes two. Whatever she builds has to be legible to a stranger by the time she puts it down. That single constraint drove almost every product decision here: one roster of record instead of exports, an audit trail attached to every edit, officer roles that expire with the term, and a handover report that reads like a document rather than a database dump. If a feature could not be explained to an incoming officer in one page, it did not ship.

How I work with the officers who use this

I do not run this from a distance. Every month I sit on calls with treasurers and membership chairs, usually in the two weeks before a dues run opens or the two weeks after a chapter year closes, because those are the moments when the software either holds or breaks. I ask to see the spreadsheet they were using before. I ask what they wrote by hand in the margin, because the margin is where the real requirements are: the member whose dues are waived because she is recovering from surgery, the sustaining member who pays in two installments, the chapter that prorates to the quarter rather than the month.

I am accountable for four things and I say them plainly. The roster and the ledger belong to the chapter, and I will hand them back in a plain spreadsheet at any hour without a conversation. The price on the pricing page is the price, with no percentage skimmed off dues. Nothing about a member is ever sold, rented or used to market anything. And when something in the software is wrong during a dues run, I answer within one business day and I tell you what happened rather than what is convenient.

I also write everything on this site myself, including the FAQ and the legal pages. If a claim appears here, it came from a chapter that agreed to have it published, or from our own operating figures. When a number changes, the page changes with it.

Experience and expertise

  • Publication director of MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes and operates ChapterDues.
  • Ten years designing and shipping record keeping software for small organizations that run on volunteer labor and annual budgets.
  • Direct work with treasurers, membership chairs and program chairs in chapters ranging from 38 members to state associations of several thousand.
  • Practical grounding in dues accounting, prorated joining rules, event cost recovery and the audit expectations that boards and national offices apply at year end.
  • Responsible for the product roadmap, the support inbox and the accuracy of every sentence published on this site.

How this product is built and maintained

ChapterDues ships on a two week cadence, and every release note names what changed and what an officer needs to do about it, if anything. Feature work comes from the support inbox and from those monthly calls, not from a competitive checklist. During the two heaviest weeks of the calendar, the turn of the dues year, we freeze anything that touches the ledger and put the whole team on support.

The editorial standard for this site is simple. Every statistic printed here is drawn from our own platform data or from a chapter that reviewed and approved the wording. Testimonials carry a full name, an office, an organization and a city, and the woman quoted read the sentence before it went up. Pricing on the page always matches what appears on the invoice. Nothing is described as available if it is not available to a customer today.

On data handling, the standards are equally plain: encryption in transit and at rest, access restricted to the officers a chapter names, a full audit trail on every write, and no third party advertising trackers or analytics cookies anywhere on this website. The privacy policy lists the exact fields the contact form collects and how long they are kept.

Published articles

Everything below appeared in The Chapter Ledger, the ChapterDues magazine for volunteer officers, and I wrote each piece myself against the questions officers actually send in.

Contact the author

Write to me at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. If you are weighing this against another tool, say so, and tell me your member count and your dues year. I will tell you honestly whether ChapterDues fits, including when it does not. You can also start with a walkthrough request and I will read it myself.

Published and maintained by Jimenez Julien for MLJ, SASU. Questions about this page go to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.