Bringing history across from Member Mojo

Moving the members over is the easy half, and the Member Mojo import already does it. The half clubs actually worry about is everything that came before: eight years of “when did she join”, “did he pay in 2021”, “what did we send them about the AGM”. A club that loses that on the day it switches has not moved its records — it has started again.

📤 Getting it out of Member Mojo

Member Mojo shows two histories, on two screens, one member at a time:

• Activity — date, type and description. Mostly emails sent, with the odd membership event.
• Payments — the payment reference, date, type, item, price and state. Renewals, donations and checkout items such as locker hire.

Copy each table into the matching template — there is a download button for both — or export from Member Mojo and paste the columns across.

👤 Two columns you have to add

Member and Email, at the front. Member Mojo shows one person’s history at a time and its tables carry no name, so without them there is nothing to attach a row to. The templates have both columns already; fill them in as you paste each member’s history underneath the last.

Matching is by email first, because it is exact. Falling back to the name, Pavilion will only accept it when exactly one member has that name — two J. Smiths and a guess is how eight years of somebody’s history lands on the wrong person, which is worse than not importing it. Anyone who could not be matched is listed by name at the end so you can put them right and run it again.

📅 Dates are read the British way

05/08/2026 is the fifth of August, not the eighth of May. That sounds obvious and is the single commonest way an import of British data comes out silently wrong by up to eleven months.

💷 What happens to the payments

They land as history on the member’s record — what they paid, for what, and when — so their record does not begin abruptly on the day the club changed software.

They are deliberately not posted to the accounts. A payment from 2021 belongs in 2021’s books, which are closed, examined and filed. Writing it into this year’s ledger would put the accounts out by the whole of the club’s history. If you want the old years in the accounts as well, that is an opening balance, not an import.

Only completed payments come across. A cancelled or abandoned basket in Member Mojo is not a payment, and importing it as one would overstate what every member has ever paid.

🔁 Running it twice is safe

Member Mojo’s payment reference is unique, so it is kept and checked. The activity log has no reference, so the member, the date and the description are fingerprinted instead. Either way the second run imports nothing and tells you how many it recognised — so you can do it in batches, or start again after fixing the unmatched names, without doubling anybody’s history.

🔎 Try it before you mean it

Every import offers a dry run first: the same counts, nothing written. Worth doing on one member’s history before pasting four hundred.

Common questions

Do I have to do this member by member?

Getting it out of Member Mojo, yes — it shows one member at a time. Putting it into Pavilion, no: paste everybody into one sheet and import it in one go, which is what the Member and Email columns are for.

Will the imported payments show in this year's accounts?

No, and that is deliberate. They are a record on the member, not a transaction. Your accounts start where your accounts start.

Can I tell later which entries were imported?

Yes — every imported row is marked with where it came from. A year from now nobody should have to wonder whether a 2019 payment was real or something the migration invented.

Some rows say no member matched.

Usually an email address that has changed since, or a name spelt differently in the two systems. Put the right email in the sheet and run it again — the rows that did come across are recognised and skipped.

What about the last 50 limit on those screens?

Member Mojo shows the most recent fifty. That is generally the whole of a member’s payment history and only part of a busy member’s email log. Take what it gives you: fifty entries of context is a great deal more than none.