How dues status grants and revokes member access

What this is

Verinode HQ never lets a member's own account decide whether it belongs to your association. A separate dues-reconcile engine sits underneath Member Directory and Dues & Renewal and makes that call for every matched member, every time your roster changes. This article is about what that engine actually grants and revokes, the RIA member badge and access to your association's benchmark cohort, and the two moments that trigger it: importing a roster and running Reconcile dues.

Two things are always true about a matched member's access:

• They keep the RIA badge and the association's benchmark cohort only for as long as your roster shows their dues as current.
• The moment your roster shows anything else (lapsed, in a grace period, or no recognized status), the next reconcile pass takes both away, automatically, with no separate confirmation step.

Nobody on your team has to remember to flip a member's access on or off by hand. You maintain the roster; the engine keeps access in sync with it.

What "access" actually means here

For a matched member, access has exactly two parts, and they always move together:

1. The RIA member badge on their account, the marker that says they're a verified association member.
2. Membership in your association's benchmark cohort, which is what unlocks the peer benchmarks and network intelligence that come with belonging to your association.

There's no partial state. A member either has both, because your roster currently shows their dues as current, or has neither, because it doesn't. The engine never grants one without the other and never revokes one while leaving the other in place.

Where this shows up

The engine itself has no page of its own. It runs underneath three surfaces:

• Member Directory (hq.verinode.ai/members), where you import your roster and where the Reconcile dues button lives, next to Choose CSV in the Import Roster section. This is where you, the association admin, trigger reconciliation.
• Dues & Renewal (hq.verinode.ai/dues), where you read the outcome back as roster-wide health: the dues-current percentage, the lapsed count, and the Renewals Due and Recently Lapsed rows. See Dues statuses: current, grace, lapsed, and pending for how that page reads status.
• The member's own Settings, on their account, not yours. When they self-declare RIA membership, they see a status line that updates as your roster and your reconcile actions change their access. That line is covered below so you know exactly what a member sees when you approve them, or when their dues lapse.

Only association admins can import a roster, click Reconcile dues, or approve and reject claims in the Verification Queue. Any HQ user in your organization can view Member Directory and Dues & Renewal.

The two triggers

Reconciliation runs in exactly two situations. Both run the identical check across every matched member in your association, not just the rows that changed.

1. 1Every roster import. Each time you upload a CSV in Member Directory, the import finishes first (adding or updating roster rows by member number), then reconciliation runs automatically against your whole matched membership. The confirmation line reads "Imported N members." and, only when reconciliation actually changed someone's status, adds "Dues sync: X activated, Y revoked."
2. 2Reconcile dues, on demand. Click Reconcile dues in Member Directory any time you want to force the same check without a new file, for example right after you hand-correct one row's dues status, or when you just want to confirm nothing has drifted since your last import. The button reads "Reconciling…" while it runs and reports "Dues reconciled: X activated, Y revoked." when done, always showing both numbers, including zero, since you asked for the check explicitly.

Both triggers call the same reconciliation pass. There's no difference in what gets checked or how access changes, only in what causes the check to run.

How a member gets access in the first place

Reconciliation only ever manages members who have already been matched once. Getting to that first match is a separate, always-manual step:

1. The operator self-declares. From their own Settings, an operator can state they belong to your association and optionally give a member number. This writes a pending claim. It grants nothing on its own, not a badge, not benchmark access.
2. You import your authoritative roster, the only source Verinode trusts for who is really a paying member and whether their dues are current.
3. You approve a specific match in the Verification Queue. Verinode proposes candidates by matching the claim's member number or email against your roster and labels each one "Member number match" or "Email match." Approving is always your decision, an exact match is only ever a candidate, never an automatic activation. The Approve button is disabled whenever the matched roster row's dues aren't current, you cannot activate a new member against a lapsed row even by hand. The moment you approve, that member gets both the badge and benchmark cohort access for the first time, and becomes something reconciliation will manage from then on.

Once approved, step 3 never has to happen again for that member. Their access from that point forward rises and falls purely with the dues status your roster reports, run through reconciliation.

Revoke on lapse

When a reconcile pass, automatic after an import or manual via the button, finds an approved member whose current roster row no longer reads current dues (lapsed, in a grace period, or unrecognized), it removes both pieces of access from that member at once: the benchmark cohort membership and the RIA badge. There's no grace period on the access itself and no extra confirmation, the change takes effect the moment the pass runs.

The member keeps their row on your Roster list, nothing is deleted, it simply shows whatever dues status your import gave it, no longer the badge's underlying privileges. The next time they load their own account, their Settings, Benchmarks, and feed all reflect the change immediately.

Restore on renewal

The reverse runs through the identical mechanism. If a reconcile pass finds a previously-revoked, or newly current, matched member whose roster row now reads current dues, it restores both the benchmark cohort membership and the RIA badge in that same pass. Nobody has to re-approve them in the Verification Queue, once a claim has been matched once, dues status alone drives their access indefinitely, lapsing and renewing as many times as your roster's real history has.

What the member sees on their own account

A member who self-declared sees a status line in their own Settings that tracks the same access your reconciliation controls. This is worth knowing exactly, since it's the surface your members actually read when they wonder why a badge appeared or disappeared:

| Their status | What their Settings shows | |---|---| | Pending, not yet matched | "Pending verification by RIA. Your RIA badge and RIA network benchmarks activate once RIA confirms your membership." | | Matched and currently active | "Verified RIA member. Your RIA badge and RIA network benchmarks are active." | | Matched, but dues not current | "Your RIA membership is on hold. RIA shows your dues as not current, so the badge and RIA benchmarks are paused until renewal." | | Claim reviewed and rejected | "RIA could not match your membership. Check your member number below, or reach out to RIA." |

The middle row is the one reconciliation writes to directly: a member doesn't need to be rejected or to withdraw to lose access, a lapse alone is enough to flip them from "active" to "on hold" without anyone touching their claim.

A member can also withdraw their own claim from Settings at any time. If they were active, withdrawing removes their benchmark cohort membership and badge immediately, and their claim is deleted outright rather than left in a rejected state, so they'd need to self-declare again to be reconsidered.

Counts you'll see reported

Every reconcile pass, whichever of the two triggers ran it, reports back exactly two numbers: how many members were activated and how many were revoked in that single pass. Only members whose access actually changed as a result of that specific pass are counted, a member who was already current and stays current isn't counted, and neither is one who was already revoked and stays that way. When nothing changed, both numbers are zero, and for the manual button that's still reported plainly rather than staying silent.

Holding the privacy boundary

Reconciliation only ever reads two things: the dues status and identifying fields (member number, contact email) on the roster row your association uploaded, and the claim an operator submitted about their own membership. It never reads, and never needs, anything about a member's day-to-day business, their jobs, their margins, their clients, or any other data that belongs to them. Access decisions here are membership decisions your association already makes for dues and renewal purposes; Verinode's role is to apply that decision consistently and reflect it back, not to originate it. Your members own their operating data regardless of what their dues status controls here.

Related help

• How dues status controls membership (Reconcile dues) for the full Member Directory page, including the stats row, CSV import format, Verification Queue, and Roster list this engine sits underneath.
• Dues statuses: current, grace, lapsed, and pending for how each status reads on the Dues & Renewal page.
• Member Directory: the reconciled membership model for the four-step model this article's step 3 (approval) fits into.
• Importing your association roster from CSV for the CSV format and how a re-import updates existing rows.