2008/11/30 Paul Williams paul@skenmy.com:
Are there any legal implications to this? Is payment required to be a member? Remember, cheques can bounce, and while I do not anticipate there being any issues with our memberbase, such things can happen. Then you get into the tricky business of disassociating a member if they refuse to pay.
The governing documents lay out specific procedures for members that are behind in payments (I think they have 6 months to pay and then the board can terminate membership). The other problem is what you do if something goes wrong and the bank account is never opened and we end up dissolving the company again (God forbid!) - if the membership is kept to just the board then that process would be easy, if there are loads of other members that need to be consulted it gets much harder (having to hold a proper EGM just to close everything down as a lost cause would be rather regrettable). It's a very very small risk, but there is essentially no benefit at all to accepting members earlier, so why do so? As long as everyone that applies is a member in time for all the official notifications about the AGM, then everything is fine.