The instructions, answers, and hints on this page pertain to managing your membership account and are in response to frequently asked questions (FAQs) or difficulties that members have experienced in managing their accounts.
The ISTFP is managing membership through a website payment system, by bank transfer or credit card payment via PayPal. Either method of payment needs to be initiated by the member. Please login to your account, https://istfp.org/membership-account/, resetting password if necessary, click “please renew for 2023” (or for whichever years you have not yet paid), chose the membership type, and select pay by bank transfer or credit card. Once you have initiated or made payment, go back to your account page to observe if you are pending and/or if your level has changed. Those who are currently expired have no level.
If you paid by credit card at PayPal, your efforts should be complete, however, in a small number of cases we have seen the payment not go through. You may be told by PayPal that we need to review something, but we have found in most cases that there is nothing we can do to help complete the transaction. If you try again, minutes later, an hour or day later, you may have success the second time. Please persevere until you see you have actually been charged by PayPal. Then check that your level has changed and your recent payment in the Past Invoices area shows paid.
If you indicated you would pay by bank transfer, please make the transfer right away after committing to do so. You level will change, but your recent payment in the Past Invoices area of your account will show pending as this is not an automated process. Our Treasurer may check the ISTFP bank account every couple days or less frequently later in the year. When your payment is observed, your pending status will be changed to paid and you will again have access to member-only website content. Please take a look at your account a few days after payment to see if the payment has been received and acknowledged. If you don’t see the pending change to paid within a week, check your own bank’s progress in sending the payment and then check with us. Please do not make a bank transfer without first initiating it in the website system from your account page. Doing so leaves us no way to complete the process when payment is received and requires extra effort on the part of volunteers to be back in touch with you.
Please update your profile every so often. Please remember to use the Roman alphabet. If someone else or an organization is making payment for you, please include that name in the Payer field of your profile.
Thank you very much for following these procedures; it alleviates extra effort by our volunteers. We aim to make this process easy for you. Let us know if we can help in some way.
Some members have particular invoice needs. The only personal information that CAN appear on your invoice is that which is in your profile. Please include all the information you need on your invoice in your profile. (The only field that doesn’t appear is degree.) The invoices function equally as receipts. At present, the emailed receipt contains the information in your profile. We are making efforts to include that information in the website display as well. For now, please be sure to save your emailed receipt.
If you already have an account, please do not create a new account unless you had previously used an email address AS your username and that email address has changed. All current members are now in the website system. If in doubt about your username and email address that you have used, contact webmaster. Your email address CAN be updated in your profile as long as it is not your username. (The system is set up to no longer allow an email address as a username as it can change.)
It is imperative that members have access to their accounts as we build our knowledge-bank of member-only content.
