Quorum Is Not Attendance — Three Questions a Membership List Cannot Answer
A club's records are fine until somebody disputes a vote. Then three questions arrive at once: who was a member that day, were enough of them present, and was the person who moved it entitled to vote. A spreadsheet of names and payment dates answers none of them.
Most of the time a club runs on goodwill and a spreadsheet, and that is genuinely fine.
Then one year a vote is close, or unpopular, or costs somebody something, and it gets questioned. Now three separate questions arrive at the same time.
Who was a member on the date of that meeting? Were enough of them in the room for it to decide anything? And was the person who proposed it entitled to vote at all?
They look like one question about a list. They are three, and they need three different facts.
The conflation that causes the trouble
The instinct is to keep one list with a column for "paid" and another for "attended". That merges two things that must stay apart.
Attendance is a record of fact. Someone was in the room, or they were not. Their subscription status has nothing to do with it. A lapsed member who turns up is present — recording them as absent would be a lie about the room.
Standing decides whether they may vote. That is a different fact, derived from what they have paid and when, against the date of the meeting.
Software that gates the door on standing produces a register that cannot answer either question. You can no longer say who was there, and you have quietly disenfranchised someone in a way nobody voted for.
Membora keeps them separate on purpose. Anyone can be marked present. Standing gates the vote, and when a lapsed member's vote is refused, the refusal names the lapse date rather than shrugging.
Quorum has to have exactly one definition
The second question is the one that decides whether a meeting did anything at all.
Quorum sounds simple and goes wrong in a specific way: it gets computed in more than one place. The screen counts one thing, an export counts another, and an API — if there is one — counts a third. Each is defensible on its own. Together they mean the club has no quorum rule, it has three.
Membora computes it in one place, from the roll and the rule, and the screen, the REST API and the assistant tool all read that one answer. A quorum that means something different depending on where you ask is not a quorum.
A motion cannot carry at an inquorate meeting
This is the rule the product exists for, and it is enforced rather than advised.
Try to carry a motion at a meeting that has not reached quorum and it is refused. The refusal names the numbers — 4 present, 5 required — and the motion stays open rather than being marked as anything.
Rejecting is refused for the same reason. An inquorate meeting cannot decide a motion in either direction; that is what inquorate means.
Withdrawing is still allowed, and the distinction matters. Withdrawal is not a decision the meeting takes — it is the proposer taking their own motion back — so quorum has nothing to say about it.
The roll call updates as it fills
Mark people present during the meeting and the quorum figure moves with the room. The fifth arrival is the moment the meeting becomes able to decide, and the screen says so rather than making the secretary count heads and remember the constitution.
There is a small piece of copy on that screen that is really the whole design: work down this list at the end to close the roll — an unmarked member is a silence, not an absence. Not marking someone is not the same as recording that they were away, and the register should not pretend otherwise.
Standing is derived, not ticked
Subscriptions are rates and periods and what each member has paid. Good standing is computed from that against a date — not a checkbox somebody remembered to update after a bank transfer cleared.
A checkbox is a second copy of a fact that already exists in the payment record, and it is wrong from the first time the two disagree.
What it deliberately does not do
Membora takes no payments. It records what was paid and derives standing from it; there is no card processing and no direct debit. Your bank stays your bank.
There is no member portal — the people in the register are tracked, not users. The committee members who administer it have accounts, roles and 2FA.
There is no online or remote voting. It records votes taken at a meeting, with the standing and quorum checks around them. It is not a ballot platform.
One organisation per installation.
All of that is on the product page, because a club deciding what to use should be able to rule it out in ninety seconds.
What the alternatives price
WildApricot publishes '$66.00/mo' at 100 contacts billed monthly, and states 'All packages offer the same WildApricot features and benefits' — so the higher bands buy permission to have more members, not more product. Join It publishes '$29/mo' on Starter plus '3.0% service fee for online transactions', with the percentage falling as the monthly fee rises. Both read from their own pages on 22 August 2026.
Those are real products doing more than Membora does — websites, event registration, payment processing. If you want members to join and pay through the tool, that is worth paying for.
The year it matters
Most years, none of this comes up. The list is fine, the meetings are friendly, nobody counts.
The year it does come up, you need to say who was a member on a date eighteen months ago, whether the meeting was quorate, and whether the proposer could vote — and you need the record to have been keeping those three things apart the whole time, because you cannot reconstruct them afterwards.