Cash calls

What it is

A cash call bills every equity member their proportional share of a one-off cost (an engine overhaul, a hangar deposit, an avionics upgrade) in a single step. The admin enters a title, an optional description, the total amount, and a due date; Syndik8 splits the total across the syndicate’s active equity members in proportion to their shares and posts one Cash call charge ledger entry per member, all in one atomic operation.

The cash call itself is a parent record holding only the headline fields (title, description, total, due date). Everything per-member lives on the ledger: each member’s share is a charge linked back to the parent call, and lands on their balance on its due date. The call’s status is derived from those charges, not stored separately.

For the step-by-step admin flow, see Issue a cash call. This page covers the concepts and rules.

Who can use it

Admin (treasurer counts as admin): issues and cancels cash calls, and sees every member’s charge and paid state on the call’s detail screen.
Equity member (shares greater than zero): is charged their share, sees the syndicate’s cash calls, and sees their own charge. Members without equity (renters) and former members are never charged.

Where to find it

Admins: syndicate Admin tab, then Cash calls (under Money). The list shows every call, newest due first, with a status chip; tapping a call opens its detail screen.
Members: the Cash calls not due yet card on the member balance screen lists each charge whose due date has not arrived, with its due date and its own Pay button, and taps through to the call’s detail. Once a call falls due it leaves the card and becomes an ordinary row in the balance ledger below; once it is paid it leaves too and appears in Settled.

On the detail screen, the Per-member charges section shows one row per charge with a paid or unpaid marker. Admins see every member’s row; a member sees their own.

Concepts

The split

The total is divided in the smallest unit of the syndicate’s currency (pence, for a syndicate billing in sterling), weighted by shares, at the moment the call is issued:

A call must be worth at least a penny to every share, so a syndicate with 1,000 shares between its members cannot raise a call below £10.00. This is arithmetic rather than policy: the split works in whole pence, so a smaller call would give somebody a charge of nothing, and a charge of nothing is neither owed nor paid — no payment method will take it and nothing can clear it, so it would sit on that member’s balance for ever. The screen tells you the minimum for your syndicate before you submit.
Only active equity members (membership status active, shares greater than zero) are included.
Each member is first allocated their exact share rounded down to a whole unit.
Any leftover units are then handed out one each to the members whose exact shares had the largest fraction rounded away (ties are broken by higher share count, then the issuing admin, then a fixed member order). No member absorbs more than a single extra unit, and the parts always sum exactly to the total.

For example, a £1,000 call across three members holding 3, 2, and 1 shares works out at £500.00, £333.33, and £166.67. The spare penny goes to the one-share member, because their exact share (£166.666…) had the most rounded away; it does not automatically go to the largest shareholder.

The live preview on the create screen runs the same rule as the server, so the preview the admin reads is exactly what gets charged.

Snapshot at issue

The split is frozen when the call is issued. Later changes to the membership roster or to anyone’s share count never reshuffle charges on an existing call; a member who leaves after being charged still owes their share.

States

A cash call’s state is derived from its charges each time it is read:

State	Meaning
Pending	No charge has been paid yet.
Partial	At least one member has paid, but not all.
Complete	Every charge has been settled.
Cancelled	An admin cancelled the call before any payment landed.

A call past its due date with nothing paid is still Pending; being overdue drives reminders (below), not a separate state.

Every charge on a call is worth at least a penny, because a call too small to manage that is refused when it is issued. So a call reaches Complete once every member has paid, with no share to discount.

Due dates and reminders

The due date is required. It is what makes the call collectable and what tells members when they are being asked for the money. A call raised without one could never be collected by Direct Debit, and would sit in every member’s balance with nothing to say when it was owed.

It can be corrected, but never removed. An admin can move an issued call to a different date from the call’s detail screen; see Correct a cash call’s due date. The correction moves the date in both places it is held: on the call, which is what everyone reads, and on each member’s charge, which is what the nightly Direct Debit sweep actually collects on. Move the date and the collection, the reminders and each member’s balance all follow it.

Four notifications are involved, carried on three types:

Cash call issued: sent immediately to each charged member when the call is issued, stating their share. The admin who issued the call is not sent it: they already know, having just done it. They are still charged their share, still counted in every balance, and still chased by the reminders below. This type follows the member’s notification preferences.
Cash call due date changed: sent under the same Cash call issued type, and therefore silenced with it, when an admin corrects an issued call’s date. It names both days, so it cannot be read as a second demand, and no amount is restated. It goes to every member who still has something to pay on the call, apart from the admin who made the change; a cancelled charge and a fully paid one are both left out, on the same principle as the reminders below — the date is not news to somebody who owes nothing. A member who has paid part of her share is still told, because the remainder still falls due on the new day. Re-saving the same date sends nothing.
Cash call due soon: sent daily at 09:00 (server time) to each member with an unpaid charge, starting three days before the due date and continuing up to and including the due date itself. One reminder per member per day.
Cash call overdue: sent daily at 09:00 to each member whose charge is still unpaid once the due date has passed, and repeats every day until the charge is paid or the call is cancelled.

Due soon and overdue are deadline-bearing and sit in the always-on email tier: their emails cannot be switched off and they bypass digest mode, though push for them remains a preference. See Notification types. Members who have already paid stop receiving reminders; reminders only ever target charges with something still owed on them.

Settlement tracking

A cash-call charge is settled the same way as any other unpaid charge on the member’s balance: an in-app payment, a Direct Debit collection, or an admin recording an externally received payment. There is no cash-call-specific payment flow. As each member’s charge settles, the paid marker on the detail screen updates and the call’s state chip moves from Pending through Partial to Complete.

Behaviour rules

Issuing is admin-only and online-only. The server rejects non-admin callers, and the Issue cash call button disables while the device is offline (the per-member ledger writes are a single transaction that cannot be queued).
A call needs someone to charge. Issuing fails if the syndicate has no active equity members.
Two admins cannot double-charge. Concurrent issuances against the same syndicate are serialised on the server; the second admin’s call goes through as a separate, new call, never as duplicate charges on the first.
The due date can be corrected in place, by an admin. The correction is refused on a cancelled call, in a closed syndicate, and while a payment or Direct Debit collection is holding any of the call’s charges. Money already in flight was dispatched against the old date, and the member has an advance notice naming the day. A syndicate that is read-only because it is over its free plan can still correct a date, because correcting one creates no new liability. Amounts, the split, and who is charged are untouched.
Cancellation is only possible while wholly unpaid. If any charge has been settled, or a payment or Direct Debit collection is holding any of the call’s charges, the server refuses to cancel. Once a charge has been paid the detail screen replaces the Cancel cash call button with an explanation; while a collection is merely in flight the button is still shown and the refusal comes back after you confirm. Tapping Cancel cash call asks Cancel this cash call and delete its unpaid charges?; Cancel the cash call proceeds and Keep this cash call backs out. Backing out individual charges after payment is a job for reversals or manual adjustments.
Cancelled charges stay on the ledger. Cancelling stamps the call and every unpaid charge as cancelled rather than deleting them, so the audit trail records that the member was billed and the call was then withdrawn. The confirmation describes this as deleting the unpaid charges; what it deletes is their claim on every member’s balance. The rows themselves stay, and still appear in the Per-member charges list on the cancelled call. Cancelled charges drop out of running balances and out of the member’s not-yet-due card.
Cash calls use the syndicate’s currency. The total and every per-member charge are in the syndicate’s configured billing currency (set on the Payment account screen); the amount field and the live split preview show that currency’s symbol. There is no separate currency picker on the cash-call form.
The total always adds up. The split is computed in the smallest currency unit, so the per-member charges always sum to the entered total exactly, with nothing lost to rounding.
A charge is not owed before its due date. Until the date arrives, a member’s share is outside their balance figure, outside the Outstanding rows, and outside Pay All — it lives in the Cash calls not due yet card instead, totalled on a Not due yet line under the balance. A Direct Debit has always behaved this way, so all three now agree. Members can still pay early from the card, and on the due date the charge becomes an ordinary outstanding charge in every respect.