- You must be signed in to the CMS.
- Your account must hold the lodge-admin or treasurer role for this organisation.
- An organisation must be selected — the system reads it from your session.
- At least one dues assessment must already exist for the organisation, otherwise the picker will be empty.
Step by step
- Open the Management menu in the office header
At the top of the office screen you will see two menus: Actions and Management. Click Management to open the drop-down.
- Click 'Correct the books'
Find the item labelled 'Correct the books' in the Management menu and click it. Your organisation may display a different label if it has customised the menu wording, but it sits in the money group. The menu closes and the CMS loads the corrections screen.
- Wait while the system loads your assessments and payments
Behind the scenes the CMS confirms your session, checks that you belong to the selected organisation, and then fetches up to 200 active assessments and 200 active payments for it. Assessments are listed with the member name and year; payments with the member name, amount, and date. If your session or role cannot be confirmed, the page will not load.
- Read the 'Correct the books' screen
The page opens inside the full office shell with the heading 'Correct the books'. A short paragraph beneath it explains that corrections are non-destructive — nothing is deleted. Below that is the correction form.
- Choose what needs correcting from the first selector
The 'What needs correcting' selector offers five options: Adjust what a member owes, Waive what a member owes, Void an assessment, Refund a payment, and Void a payment. Select the one that fits your situation. The form below the selector changes to match your choice.
- PATH A — Adjust: complete the adjustment form and submit
If you chose 'Adjust what a member owes', select the specific assessment from the 'Which one' list, enter the dollar amount to adjust in the amount field (use a negative number for a credit), and type a plain-sentence reason in the 'Why' field. All three fields are required. Click 'Adjust it' to submit. The button will read 'Saving…' while the correction is being applied.
- PATH B — Waive: complete the waiver form and submit
If you chose 'Waive what a member owes', select the assessment from the 'Which one' list and type the reason in the 'Why' field. Both fields are required. Click 'Waive it' to submit.
- PATH A — The system validates and records the adjustment
The CMS re-confirms your session so the adjustment cannot be redirected to another organisation. It rejects a missing reason or a zero amount before proceeding. Your dollar figure is converted to cents, then added to the assessment's running adjustment total. A new row is appended to the assessment's adjustment history containing the amount, your reason, a timestamp, and your user ID. The system also checks that the adjusted total cannot fall below zero.
- PATH A — Balances and status are recalculated
After the adjustment is saved, the system reloads all payments allocated to that assessment, sums the effective amounts accounting for any voids or refunds, recomputes the total due, works out the new balance, and derives a fresh status. The updated figures are written back to the assessment record.
- PATH B — The system validates and records the waiver
The CMS re-confirms your session. It rejects an empty reason. It then loads the assessment and writes the waived status and your reason to the exemption reason field via Payload's access-controlled update path.
- An audit event is recorded for the correction
After every successful correction the CMS appends a row to the audit log.
- The page is revalidated
After the server action completes, the CMS calls revalidatePath so the corrections screen immediately reflects the new state of the assessment.
- Read the confirmation message on screen
A status message appears above the form. For an adjustment it reads 'Adjusted. $X is now due, $Y of it owing.' For a waiver it reads 'Waived. Nothing is owing, and the record says why.' If something went wrong, an error message appears in the same place.
- Confirm the original record is preserved
In both cases the original assessment record is never deleted.
What happens next
The original charge amount is unchanged.
For a waiver, the assessment's status is 'waived', the reason you supplied is stored against it, and the balance is effectively cleared. In both cases the original assessment record is never deleted, so your financial history stays complete and auditable.
Good to know
The amount field for an adjustment uses decimal dollars — enter a negative figure to reduce what is owed, a positive figure to increase it. The system converts this to cents internally and will reject a zero entry because an adjustment of nothing is not an adjustment.
Both the adjustment and waiver operations re-verify your session at the moment of submission, not just when the page loads. This means even if you left the tab open for a while, the system will still check that you hold the right role for the right organisation before writing anything.
Daviah — Adjust what a member owes or waive a charge entirely without deleting records, keeping your books clean and auditable.