Create a Billing Notice

Table of Contents

1. What a Billing Notice Is
2. How a Notice Is Put Together
3. The Seven Types of Notice
4. When to Use Them
5. Naming and Organizing Your Notices
6. Writing the Content
7. Billing Notice Content Examples

What a Billing Notice Is

A billing notice is a reusable email template that Rhythm sends to members as part of a billing run.

You build each notice once, in Membership & Committees → Setup → Billing → Billing Notices. From then on, you attach it to a billing run action by name. The notice itself contains no logic and no audience — it is only the message. The billing run decides who receives it and when; the notice decides what they read.

That separation is the thing to internalize:

Because notices are reusable, most associations build one set and then reference the same set from every billing run and billing template going forward. 

Note: A notice will not send on its own. It only goes out when a billing run action that references it actually executes. Creating a notice is safe; nothing is sent until a run processes.

How a Notice is Put Together

Each billing notice record has four things that matter:

The Seven Types of Notice

Rhythm's billing engine has exactly seven places where a notice can be attached. Each corresponds to one billing run action. Build one notice for each action you plan to use.

Reminders are the one type you'll build more than once. A billing run accepts multiple reminders, each with its own date range and its own notice — so a first, second, and third reminder are three separate notice records with escalating language that can all be attached to the same run.

When to Use Them

You use a billing notice whenever a billing run needs to tell a member something. In practice that means you should have one built and ready for every billing action you intend to run.

The natural cadence over a membership year can look something like this:

Timing rules to consider

1. Auto-renewal reminders go out before the charge. Standard renewal reminders go out after the notice or order. 
These are different workflows on different clocks. A standard reminder is chasing an unpaid invoice you already sent. An auto-renewal reminder is a courtesy warning that a card is about to be charged, giving the member a chance to update their payment method or cancel. Sending them on the same schedule is a common misconfiguration.

2. Drops respect expiration plus grace.
If a member expires in April and you have a 30-day grace period, the drop run treats their effective expiration as May. Members in grace still hold full benefits — the drop is the mechanism that ends them.

3. Your renewal window must be at least as long as your earliest notice.
The renewal window set on the renewal Application Process controls when the "Renew" option actually appears in the member portal. If you send a 90-day renewal notice but your renewal window is 30 days, members who follow that email will log in and find no way to renew, and they will contact your staff instead. Check this before your first cycle: whatever your earliest notice is, the window must be equal or wider. A window wider than your earliest notice is harmless; narrower is not.

Note: In Rhythm, a membership does not become inactive on its own. Expiration alone changes nothing. Until a drop run executes, an expired member keeps their active status and keeps receiving benefits indefinitely.

Naming + Organizing Your Notices

Notices appear in a flat, alphabetically-sorted dropdown when you configure a billing run. Once you have ten or more, that list can become hard to navigate, and picking the wrong one is a silent error — the run executes fine and the wrong email goes out.

We recommend numbering your notices in lifecycle order. This is the single highest-value convention, and it's what our most mature customers do:

• Initial Renewal Notice - 90 Day 

• Renewal Reminder - 60 Day 

• Renewal Reminder - 30 Day 

• Renewal Reminder - Lapsed and in Grace 

• Dropped Notification 

• Renewal Reminder - Auto-Renew 

• Expiring Card Notice 

• Successful Auto-Renewal Notice 

• Payment Failure Auto-Renewal Notice

Helpful Hint: Keep the name descriptive of the moment it sends — "3. Renewal Reminder - 30 Day" tells you everything; "Reminder Email 2" tells you nothing.

Writing the Content

Billing notice copy is ordinary member communication. It is written by the membership team in plain language, the same way you'd write any other email to your members. There is no special syntax to learn and no technical prerequisite.

Merge Fields

The template editor exposes merge fields grouped by source — contact, organization, membership, billing run, and billing run action. You aren't required to use merge fields and some notices may not need them at all.

The two that earn their place:

The "billing run" and "billing run action" groups hold run-level metadata — the internal name of the run, action statuses, and similar. These are almost never appropriate in a member-facing email. If you find yourself reaching for them, the answer you want is usually in the membership group instead.

Inserting a merge field

Don't type merge fields by hand. Use the merge field picker to choose the group (Contact, Organization, Membership, Billing Run, Billing Run Action) and then the field. Copy the merge field and paste it where you want it to appear in the email.

Hand-typing is where errors come from. A token missing a single brace — {{contact.first_name} instead of {{contact.first_name}} — will not resolve. It prints literally in the email your member receives.

Dates need one extra step

Every merge field works as inserted, except dates.

A date field on its own renders the stored system value. Instead of December 05, 2026, your member sees something like:

2026-12-05

To get a readable date, the field needs a format instruction wrapped around it. Like this:

{{moment membership.expiration_date format="MMMM DD, YYYY"}}

This renders as: December 05, 2026

Reading it left to right: moment is the formatting instruction, membership.expiration_date is the field you picked, and everything in the quotation marks describes how the date should look.

To change the appearance, change only the text inside the quotation marks — leave the rest exactly as it is:

The letters are case-sensitive. MMMM is the month name; lowercase mm means minutes and will render nonsense in a date. If a date comes out wrong, check capitalization first.

The same wrapper works on any date field — swap membership.expiration_date for whichever date field you picked, and keep the rest of the pattern identical.

Always send yourself a test

Before using a billing notice in a live billing run, run it through a test billing run against a test member and review the email. This is the only reliable way to confirm your merge fields resolve.

A field can look perfectly correct in the editor and still render empty if that data isn't populated on the member's record — which produces a sentence with a hole in it, sent to a real member, with no warning and no way to recall it. Test copy is cheap; a bad send to your full membership is not.

What every notice should contain

• The member's status in one sentence, up front. Expiring, expired, in grace, renewed, or terminated. Don't bury it.
• The single action you want them to take, with a direct link to the member portal.
• A staff contact — email and phone.
• Your logo and consistent branding, so the email is recognizably from you and not filtered as spam.

Billing Notice Content Examples

These are association-neutral starting points. Replace the bracketed placeholders, hyperlink any relevant portal pages, update any portal navigation instructions, drop in your logo and portal URL, and adjust tone to match your organization's voice.

1. Renewal Notice — 90 Day

2. Renewal Order Notice

3. Renewal Reminder — 30 Day

4. Auto-Renewal Reminder

5. Expiring Card Warning

6A. Auto-Renewal Success

6B. Auto-Renewal Failure

7. Drop Notice