Ask someone how many financial members a branch had three months ago. In most membership systems the answer is an old export or a guess, because the system only keeps each member’s current status. iMIS works that way, and our client wanted trends: the change since yesterday, over the last 30 days and across the past 12 months, for every local group and region.
So we gave it a memory. The membership counts are now saved every night, and Stuart rebuilt the history back to 2012 from older records. Staff open Power BI and see the trend straight away, with no exports and no spreadsheets to stitch together.
The numbers show where membership is moving. Deciding why, and what to do about a dip, is still a call for the people who know the members.