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Unverified sign-ups & people who never turn up

What "unverified" means

A household is unverified until someone at the library has checked them in person. Anyone who joins online starts that way, and so does anyone brought across from your previous system whose old records said they had never been checked in.

Unverified is not a penalty. They can be enrolled, they can borrow, and the only thing waiting is the moment a staff member presses Verified in person on their record. The members list has an Unverified only filter and a count at the top, so you can see who is waiting.

Sign-ups that never turn up

Some people fill in the join form and then never come. After a window you set (Settings → Members → unverified sign-up window, 60 days by default), the library retires those sign-ups automatically overnight.

Retiring is not the same as deleting:

• The household disappears from your member list, the desk, exports and your ordinary reports, exactly as if it had been removed.
• Their contact details are erased — names, email, phone, address, and any children on the record. This is deliberate: someone who filled in a form and never came back should not have their family's details sitting in your system forever.
• What survives is an anonymous shell: when they signed up, how they found you, and roughly which suburb they were in.

That shell is there so you can ask a question you could not ask before: how many people sign up and never come, and what do they have in common? The Sign-ups area in Reports answers it — by month, by how they found you, and by suburb. A cluster on the far side of town, or a spike in a month you changed your opening hours, is the kind of thing worth knowing.

Three days before a sign-up is retired, we email them a reminder that they have not been in yet — unless there is any sign they may have paid.

Nobody who paid is ever retired

If there is any trace of money — a payment on their account, or a card or PayPal payment that started and never finished — the household is never retired. It goes to a staff worklist on the members page instead, where Check payment now re-checks the payment with Stripe or PayPal and finishes the join if the money did arrive. Chase those; they are people who tried to pay you.

When they turn up after all

A retired sign-up is hidden from the member list, so you cannot find them by searching. On the Members page, tick Retired sign-ups in the filter bar — that replaces the list with everyone who was retired, showing when they signed up and when they were retired. Press Reinstate on their row and they come back as an ordinary unverified household, ready to be verified like anyone else.

The one thing reinstating cannot do is bring back the contact details, because retiring erased them. Ask the family for their details again — their record and their sign-up date are still there.

Households imported from another system

Imported households are never retired, whatever their records say about being verified. The purge is for people who filled in your online form and never appeared; a family your library carried in its previous system for years is not that, even if their old record was never marked as checked in.