Free tool
What your chapter dues have to cover before anything reaches the programs
Enter your roster count, your dues figure and the money that leaves before you can spend a dollar, and see the surplus and the break-even member count.
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How many volunteer hours your renewal season really takes
Put in your roster size, how many pay on the first notice and how you chase the rest, and see the hours your officers spend before dues are closed.
Chapters rarely lose officers over the work of running a program. They lose them over renewal season, when the membership chair spends six weeks sending individual messages and the treasurer spends her evenings matching payments to names in a bank export.
This calculator puts a number on that. It counts the members still unpaid after the first notice, the reminder rounds you send them, and the minutes it takes to match each payment to a member. The weekly figure at the bottom is the one to compare against what any volunteer can honestly give you after work.
Your result
Members still unpaid after the first notice
66
This is the group your officers chase by hand for the rest of the window.
Hours spent chasing unpaid dues
19.8
Assumes every round reaches everyone still unpaid when the window opened.
Total officer hours per renewal season
27.8
Chasing plus matching every payment back to a member record.
Hours per week during the window
3.5
Compare this against what a working volunteer can give you on a weeknight.
The chasing figure is deliberately a ceiling, since some women pay after round one, so treat it as the cost of doing renewals entirely by hand.
Where the hours actually go
Almost none of the time is spent on the ask itself. It goes on the lookup before the ask: checking whether she paid last week, finding which email address she reads now, remembering that she married and the check came in under a different last name. Every one of those checks is a minute or two, and they multiply by the number of women still unpaid.
Matching is the other half. When dues arrive through a personal payment app with a memo line that says thanks, the treasurer becomes a detective. Four minutes a payment across a roster of one hundred twenty is a full evening she will not get back.
What changes when the reminders run themselves
Set the reminder rounds to one and watch the total fall. That is roughly the shape of a chapter where the system knows who has paid and sends the second and third notices only to the women who have not, without an officer building the list each time.
The rest of the saving comes from matching. When a member pays through a link tied to her own record, the payment lands against her name with no reconciliation step. The treasurer's evening work becomes reviewing a list instead of building one, which is also why the June handover stops being a rescue mission.
Questions about this calculator
Our first notice does better than half. Does that break the estimate?
Not at all, just raise the percentage. Chapters with a fixed annual renewal date and a well known deadline do noticeably better on the first ask than chapters where renewal drifts around the calendar. If you are above sixty percent, your problem is probably matching payments rather than chasing them.
Should we count the president's time as well as the treasurer's?
Yes, if she is making calls. Renewal chasing usually gets split across the membership chair, the treasurer and whoever knows the member personally. Add their minutes together in the per reminder field, since the calculator does not care which officer spent them.
How do we use this number with the board?
Present the weekly figure, not the seasonal total. Eight hours a week for two months is a recruitment problem for your next membership chair, and boards respond to that far more readily than to an abstract total. It also makes the case for the tooling budget in plain terms.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The chapter treasurer handover checklist
Everything the outgoing treasurer of a chapter or alumnae association should close, assemble, transfer and verify so the next woman starts with a book that balances.
Turn that result into next year's dues cycle
The figure on this page is a planning number until the roster behind it holds a paid through date for every member. A demo shows what the same calculation looks like when renewals, reminders and lapsed members update themselves as dues arrive, and when the year end treasurer report is built from that ledger rather than assembled by hand in May. Bring the numbers you just produced and we will start from them.