How can I ensure correct payments and registrations?

I use registration forms for events with the PayPal integration. I have a recurring problem whereby people register at the wrong member level and I have to go behind and try to track down proper payments. Is there a way I can ensure that, based on email address, people register correctly? I do have a membership registration form that has the member's personal details and membership level that they purchased. It would be great if the form could query that data and decide at what membership level the user should be making their purchase.

I also have a problem with people registering multiple times which requires that I then send them a PayPal refund. I use the PayPal integration for both of these types of forms. Can I prevent multiple registrations somehow?

Here's an event registration form: https://form.jotform.com/220131016074135

Here's the membership form (also downloads the data to a Google Sheet): https://form.jotform.com/211567677921162

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us!

You can actually automatically pass the data entered from one form to another this way once they have signed up using the membership form the data they have entered to it can be forwarded to the next form which is the event registration form that would automatically enter the membership option that they chose.

Here is a guide that you can check in passing data from one form to another:

How to Automatically Pass Form Data to Another Form

As for preventing multiple entries on the form, you can take advantage of our unique submission feature to block multiple submissions from one system of one IP address by setting the "Check Cookies Only (Loose check)" or "Check Cookies & IP address (Strict Check)" respectively. 

You can check this guide for more information:

How to Set Unique Submissions on a Form

Let us know if you have any questions.

Hi Harvey. Thanks for the response. I don't think this addresses my problem. I have a membership drive at the beginning of the year. I'll get 100+ members through that membership drive. I have the levels: Active Member, Friend Member, and Student Member. People continue to purchase memberships throughout the year.

I also offer paid presentations throughout the year. For these events, I have created registration forms that are marketed a few weeks before the event. A user can freely choose which membership level they are which allows them to pay a certain price. They are sometimes wrong about their membership level.

For instance, Joe Smith purchases a Friend Membership in January. In April, he wants to come to an event. The registration form has an option to choose:
Active Member (free)
Friend Member ($20)
Student Member ($5)
Non-member
Joe thinks he's an Active Member and registers for free instead of paying $20 as a Friend Member. Now, I have to try to get him to pay the difference by sending an invoice and keeping on top of it.

I want to prevent him from being able register for events this year as anything other than the Friend Member that he is.

Can you explain how your solution addresses my problem?

Thanks!
Kim

Hello,

Thank you for clarifying your concern.

Apologies but it seem that the passing of data from one form to another would not be useful in your case. However, I've thought of a workaround that you can use.

Since you have a separate form that you are using to ask your members to Join or Renew their membership what you can do is to first download the submissions that are made using the Join or Renew membership form and use the submissions made to prepopulate your event registration form which would determine how much you would be charging your client that would be joining the event.

You would be using the Spreadsheet to form widget that auto-populates the data of your user to the form. The spreadsheet to form widget uses a unique code to determine the user's current membership, The unique code that I've used for this would be the email address.

Sample Excel Spreadsheet data being used:

Fields:

The My Products field would be automatically populated to the user's membership when they entered their username and click on the AutoComplete fields.

After adding those fields and instead of using the product list to list the membership level they can freely choose, You can use a single choice field instead and assign a calculation value to determine how much the user would be paying.

In this example, I have set the Non-member to be $30.

These calculation values would be then passed into the Payment field using the form calculation widget which would then charge your users.

Guide: How to Pass a Calculation to a Payment Field

After adding these fields into your form and passing the form calculation to the payment field you would be creating a different condition to determine based on their current membership level that we populated using the spreadsheet to form widget to determine on the single choice field on how much you would be charging them. Below is one of the conditions used on the sample form if the 'My Product' field on your form contains the word Active, it would automatically select the Active Member from the single choice field of your form.

Guide: How to Insert Text or Calculation into a Field Using Conditional Logic

Sample output:

Here is the link to the Cloned Sample form that I've created using the steps above:

https://form.jotform.com/220596002421949

You can use these email addresses to autocomplete:

john@example.com - Student Member

allen@example.com - Friend Member

carl@example.com - Active Member

You can also clone the form to have it saved on your account for you to check.

Here is a guide in doing so: How to Clone an Existing Form From a URL

Let us know if you have any questions.

Thank you so much! I do think this may be my answer. If the email address one uses is not recognized, it is because they are a non-member. In that case, it doesn't fill in the "My Products" section. Is there a way for JotForm to populate that field the same way the member info is populated?

Hello,

I am glad that the workaround provided works for you. In regards to an email address that is not recognized. Unfortunately, it is not possible to populate the My Products field as it will only populate based on the email address that you have on the spreadsheet that you would upload to it. However, I've created a condition on the sample form that If the email is not recognized which would leave the My Products field empty is to automatically set the Payment into Non-Member which would then charge the user for the amount set.

I hope this helps.

Let us know if you have any questions.

As I think about the business case for this, I'm wondering some things and thinking this may not actually work for me.

Often, when someone registers incorrectly, they decide they want to go ahead and become a member. So, they complete the membership application and then they go back and register for the event. If I have to upload a spreadsheet for the fields to auto-populate, the event registration form isn't going to work for them until I can get around to uploading a new spreadsheet. That would be a terrible user experience.

My current Join/Renew Membership form does a data dump to a Google Sheet. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I can just point the Spreadsheet to Form widget to that spreadsheet. I actually have to manually upload a spreadsheet. Is this correct?

If I have to upload a spreadsheet every time someone becomes a member, that means I would have to go into multiple registration forms each time there's a new member and upload an updated spreadsheet. I usually have 4-5 registrations happening simultaneously. Am I understanding this correctly?

Hello,

Yes, The spreadsheet must be uploaded into the widget for the Spreadsheet to widget form to work, It cannot be pointed to a google sheet.

Since you are using multiple registration forms you would be needing to update the spreadsheet on the widget for the days that you receive submission and the event is active.

Unfortunately, there is no other way to fetch or transfer data to the second form. If you need everything to be done automatically, the only other way I can think of would be using PHP/MySQL you would be downloading the full source code of the form and applying some PHP/MySQL programming to meet this requirement.

http://www.jotform.com/help/237-PHP-Forms-Explained

http://www.jotform.com/help/126-How-to-send-Submissions-to-Your-MySQL-Database-Using-PHP

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Thank you for all of your help. Is there a way to give feedback to the development team? I would love to see the ability to query another form's data rather than having to upload a spreadsheet so that I can fully use JotForm the way I'd like to. That one thing would solve so many business problems for me and save our nonprofit a good bit of money.

Hello SOCIETYHPS,

You're most welcome. We'll be happy to forward your feedback to the development team. I have also opened a feature request to have the ability to query another form's data. Please note that we are unable to provide an ETA for this and that there is no guarantee that this will be implemented. However, we will notify you on this thread once we received an update from our developers.

If you need further assistance, please let us know.

Hello, it has been a few months so I thought I'd circle back and see if the ability to query another form's data is possible yet. Hopefully yes, but if not, I'm still hoping that can be implemented.

Thank you so much.

Hello SOCIETYHPS,

Thanks for getting back to us. We really appreciate your patience and understanding while we handle your request. As of now, we haven't received an update yet from our Developer team about the feature enhancement that's been escalated to them.

Please note that when or if it's developed depends on their workload, how viable it is, and how many other users request it. If there are any updates, we’ll circle back to this thread and let you know. 

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Hello,

I've been really hoping that the ability to query another form's data would be a possibility. I now run another nonprofit and need this functionality for this organization as well. Is there any chance that my request will become a reality? If not, I think I'm going to need to look into different software for my needs.

Many thanks!

Hi SOCIETYHPS,

I understand how upsetting this is for you and I sense how important this is. Recently, I received a request the same as yours, and I opened a feature request as well. This is an excellent addition to our tools and making this option available earliest is depending on the number of requests that our Developers are getting.

There is a chance that this can be available in the future but we cannot promise an ETA. We will keep on asking for an update, once we received a positive response, we will circle back to this thread to inform you.

We are asking for more time and understanding to develop this option.

Thank you, Kris. I'm not upset by any means; just need for my software to work for my needs and was hoping I don't have to switch platforms as I've already put so much time and effort into JotForm for our organization. If you can add Austin Psychoanalytic as another request for this feature, that would be great.

Hello SOCIETYHPS,

Thanks for getting back to us. This thread has been forwarded to our development team. As to the materialization of the request, it depends on their workload, how viable it is, and how many other users also request it. If there are any updates, we’ll circle back to this thread and let you know.

Thanks for your patience and understanding, we appreciate it.

Hello! It's been another eight months and I'm hoping that the ability to query another form's data has come to fruition. Please do let me know.

Thank you.

Hi SOCIETYHPS,

Unfortunately, I don’t have an update yet. I know that it’s taking some time to resolve and that is very stressful. I’ve marked this as a Priority and reached out to our Developers again. 

We’ll let you know as soon as there is an update. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Thanks, Waqas. I appreciate the prioritization.