To sell recurring memberships, office plans or seats in Cobot, then you will need to add your guests as members. Members will be able to access a member portal where they will receive recurring invoices, make bookings and more!
How to Add Members
To add members, you must have at least one Membership Plan set up. If you do not want to add someone to a membership plan but want them to be part of your contact list, learn how to do this here.
After you have added your plans, adding members to Cobot is easy. This can be done one of two ways, by adding them yourself from your admin portal or the member registers themselves via your Homepage.
Manually Adding Members From the Admin Portal
Log into your admin portal and go to Manage » Members and click on Add Member.
Fill out the form with the members relevant details » choose the plan you would like to add them to » select start date and invoicing date (IMPORTANT NOTES ON THESE BELOW) » add member.
You will be taken immediately to the new members profile and they will be listed under 'Current' in your Member Overview. From here, send the new member a connect request so they can complete the registration process, set a password and access their member portal.
Click here to learn how to send the new member a connect request.
IMPORTANT NOTES
'START DATE & FIRST RECURRING INVOICE DATE'
The Start Date is the date you wish the membership to become active and for that person to have access to your space. This is also the date the member will be able to access their member portal.
This can be set for a date in the future or for the date in which you are registering them. It is not possible to set this to a date in the past.
The First Recurring Invoice Date is the date you wish to have the members first full invoice generated. Here are some possible scenarios:
Your recurring billing date is the 1st of each month. A new member signs up mid-month, like October 15th, and you want to them to receive a prorated invoice for that month, you can:
1. Set the 'First Recurring Invoice Date' for November 1st.
2. Check 'Send prorated invoice on start date.'
This generates a partial invoice for October and sets the full membership fee to be charged on November 1st. Future invoices will be generated on the 1st of each month.
Alternatively, if you want the member to be charged the full amount on their sign-up date:
1. Keep the 'Start Date' and 'First Recurring Invoice Date' the same.
2. Uncheck 'Send prorated invoice on start date.'
To set a specific day of the month as the default for invoices:
1. Go to Setup » Invoice Settings.
2. Set the 'default invoice day.'
This day will appear automatically in the member form under 'First Recurring Invoice Date.'
Members Registering Themselves via Your Homepage
The other way to register members is to let people sign themselves up via your Homepage.
Only plans that are visible to the public will appear on this page. You can edit each individual plans settings under Products » Membership Plans » Edit Plan » Basic Settings.
You can take the extra step of checking the 'New members have to be approved' box if you want to review each new member before confirming them.
To hide all plans from your Homepage at once, go to Customize » Features » Hiding Features » Hide prices from public.
To read more on the Homepage and your plan specific signup forms, click here. To read more on how to embed either of these on your website, click here.
Signup Flow
The visitor lands on your Homepage and chooses which plan they want.
They fill out the Plan Specific form with their details.
If activated, they fill out a Membership Questionnaire.
They land on the dashboard of their member portal.
They will be required to enter a payment method if 'All members must set up payment method' (under Customize » Features » Payments) is active.
The member will be able to access the dashboard only, and no other pages, until a payment method has been chosen.
To read more on how the member portal works, click here.
To read more on how to set up automated payments, click here.
Once registered and approved, all members will be listed under 'Current' in your Member Overview.
You do NOT need to connect them to their member portal as they are already connected. Yay! One less thing to do.
Importing Members
If you already have an existing member base, we can import them for you either directly from your Stripe account or from another software.
Importing Members from Stripe
If your members are in Stripe, connect your account to Cobot by going to Setup » Automated Payments » Add Payment Method and then email us your request to support@cobot.me.
If you are using Stripe subscriptions, let us know whether you want us to cancel them during the import as Cobot does not need them.
Importing Members From Another Software
We are unable to import existing members directly from another software, you will first need to download your members to a .csv or .xlsx and we can import them from there.
PLEASE NOTE we require this information in a very specific format. The easiest way to get us your date is fill out this template: Cobot Member Import Template.xlsx
Name, Plan Name, Start Date and Next Invoice Date must be filled out for each member being imported. These have been marked in yellow for you.
The 'Plan Name' field corresponds to the names of your plans as they appear in Cobot under Products » Membership Plans.
We will not be able to import your members to Cobot unless they have a corresponding plan to assign them to.
Add the name of the plan to the spreadsheet exactly as they appear in your Cobot account.
If adding company names, please add them uniformly for each member, (no abbreviations or changes in spelling) otherwise the import will identify them as separate companies.
If adding a name or company to the 'paid for by' column, make sure they also exist as a 'member' (you can add them to the sheet as well) and that the name is spelled exactly as it appears on their member profile.
Custom fields can be extra information such as license plate numbers, or other personal data you would like attached to the member profile. Add one column per custom field.
What we are unable to import is your members past invoices, payment methods or booking histories.
Once completed, send it over to support@cobot.me and we will do the rest!
We won't send them any emails to your members, and you can still use all of the management features. When you are ready, you can connect your members to their member portals at a later date.
We can also trigger the connect email to be sent to all members to save you some time when we do your import, so just let us know which you prefer.
Adding Visitors as Contacts Instead of Members
The Contacts feature in Cobot allows you to effortlessly manage visitors and non-members who access your space, making Cobot a basic CRM. This feature automatically stores contact details of people who purchase a Drop-in Passes or book a publicly listed Resource. You can also add Contacts manually, download a list of members, or convert contacts to Members. Click here to read more on this.
If you want people to be able to book a room without being members, then our robust External Bookings feature is what you need. Click here to read more on how this works.
Next Step
Learn how to invoice and collect funds from all of your numerous new members here!
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