An overview of the definition of active members in Rinsed analytics
Active Members is a crucial metric for washes focused on building their membership base and understanding the health of their membership program. Rinsed provides current active member counts and charts on active member trends over time in order to provide a holistic view of membership growth.
For example, on the “Daily” dashboard, Rinsed provides a chart on the running total of active members each day, and the current number of active members:
It is important to note that how Rinsed defines active members may differ from the definition used by the points of sale. Throughout all Rinsed analytics dashboards, Rinsed defines an active member as any member who successfully bought or renewed a membership in the previous (trailing) month, not including that day. For example, if today is February 14th, then the total active member count for today in Rinsed will include the total number of members who bought or successfully renewed a membership between January 14th and February 13th.
Each part of the above definition is important, so we can break it down further:
- Successfully bought or renewed a membership: The key here is “successfully” - if the customer’s credit card was declined or expired, then they would have a failed charge, and thus not count towards the active member number.
- Previous (trailing) month, not including that day: Since members recharge on a monthly cadence, we wouldn’t want to double-count members who charged on both e.g January 14th and February 14th. This is why we look at the previous (trailing) month, not including that day.
It is especially valuable for customers that operate with locations on multiple points of sale (POS) to have a unified definition of an active member across their locations, and the Rinsed active member definition is standard across all POS.
The point-of-sale (POS) reports may calculate active members in a different manner, leading to small differences between a Rinsed report and a POS report. There are two main reasons for differences between the two:
- If the POS considers members in their credit card decline to still be active, then the Rinsed active member count will be lower than in the POS, as Rinsed requires the member to have a successful sale or recharge in the previous month to be considered active. As an example, consider a member who recharges on the 14th of every month, but they unable to be recharged this month, and they’ve now been in payment method decline for 10 days. Since they have not had a successful sale/recharge in the past month, Rinsed analytics does not consider them active, though the POS will. This leads to the POS having a slightly higher member count.
- If the POS considers a member to be inactive as soon as they cancel, even if they’ve transacted in the previous month and can still wash until their upcoming recharge, then the Rinsed active member count will be higher than in the POS, as the member has had a successful sale or recharge in the trailing month. As an example, consider a member who just recharged on the 14th, and has now requested a cancellation on the 21st. Rinsed analytics will consider this member active until the 14th of next month, as they can wash until then, but if the POS now considers them inactive then the Rinsed active member count will be slightly higher than the POS.
Finally, please note that if Rinsed if having trouble connecting to your POS database or the database itself is experiencing a delay in data replication (colloquially just called “replication issues”), your active member chart will show a fall off, as our system won’t have data on the sales/renewals that happened in recent days. Don’t worry, you aren’t actually losing members! Our team proactively works with the POS to fix replication issues, but please also reach out to your CSM if you notice this problem or want a status update. The following is an example of a chart for a customer experiencing replication issues:
