Setting up for membership

Tip

Doing as described below does still work as of CiviCRM 5.64, but this text was written in 2020. Docs improvement: check if it's still the case today.

The "Auto-renew" option is required for the GoCardless payment processor to handle memberships.

If you use Price Sets and you have the "Auto renew option, not required" selected then the user will not be shown the tick-box allowing them to select Auto Renew, and this will break things. So better to use the straight forward require auto renew option rather than give an option that will break things.

If you want to offer a choice of processors, and some of them do support non-recurring memberships, then please see the Force Recurring setting

Technical people might like to know that without this, CiviCRM creates a single contribution and a membership record, but no contribution_recur record. This causes a crash completing the redirect flow because it can't figure out the interval (i.e. 1/year or such). It is possible to look that up from the membership ID however that leads to the situation described above, and it's then not clear what happens when the next payment comes in as it will not match up with a contribution_recur record.