Compucorp Membership Extras: Offline auto-renew questions
Thanks for looking into membership extras. Just a quick point that we are planning a release at the end of Jan which will fix a lot of bugs and issues so I would suggest to wait till that is released before using this fully.

Answers to questions below:


  
  Does this plugin actually create a recurring contribution record the same way that online payments do?
  


Yes it does - when creating a new membership you have the option to use a payment plan. If you do the system will create a recurring contribution.


  
  Is there any way to bulk apply this to our 400 existing direct debits before they auto-renew in April 2020?
  


This is a bit more tricky. For existing memberships who do not have a recurring contribution you would need to set them up with recurring contributions linked to the contributions and memberships. Perhaps with 400 or so this would be best done manually by creating new memberships starting in the new period, but alternatively you could generate a script (or if you would like some developer support with this do get in touch with me at hello@compucorp.co.uk and we can see if we can create this for you).


  
  We use two different payment processors for offline auto-renewals; a mix of "Legacy Direct Debit" and "Standing Order". Is there any way
  for auto-renewal to just use the same payment processor as the
  original contribution?
  


Afraid not. The payment processor is what does all the clever work behind the scenes to create the payment plan and instalments. Note you also need to enable the renew memberships scheduled job. Why do you need to use the existing payment processors can I ask?


  
  In some cases, a member has an existing direct debit or standing order that adds extra money as a donation on top of the annual
  membership fee. Historically, we split this into two imports: Is there
  any way to have the extension include the donation as part of the
  'duplication' auto-renew process?
  


Yes... but again this is a bit tricky to update existing memberships into. For new memberships the extension completely supports line items so you could have a membership line (or two) + donation lines on a single contribution. These would then recur with the recurring contribution.

Hope the above is useful and do keep an eye out for the v2 release which will be a big update.

Best

Jamie