membership_fee way of working

[pboosten]

Dear team,

I've been using the membership_fee for some time now, in a fairly easy setup:

all our members are in one role (called 'member'), and they pay an annual fee of 100 euros (actually 111, carnival-related, but I'll keep it simple here). In the role-settings the fee is filled, and the period. Whenever a new member is added, I use the 'recalculate' to update the fields for the contact.

So far so good. Now there's one member who wants to pay for two others, so I figured I created a family role for that:
prefix: family3 (with fee set to 300 and period to annual)
role name: family3 <some name>
updated the role settings to have a fee of 300 euros, set the period to annual.
added the three members, promoted the one who's going to pay to 'leader' [1]
ran 'options' -> 'update family roles', which gave no errors.

However, they were still in the members role as well, so I removed them from that role, and deleted the fee-value (of 100 euros, filled by the 'recalculate' previously).

[1] it's ambigious in the documentation what's meant by 'the first member found in the database': is this the contact with the lowest id in the table, or is this alphabetically?

What happens next?
Do I have to 'recalculate' the family role as well? That probably will update the fee field in the contact to 300 for all of them, which might not be desirable.

Do I have to remove them from the original member role like I did? We accept a maximum number of members and this was set in the role, however moving members to another role will break this functionality.

Removing them from the members role also 'broke' the payment analysis, since we now see three payments less in that overview. For now I think this is because payments already were done (we ask them to pay before November 11th for the upcoming year, again a carnival-thing).

I would have done this in German, but it simply was too much to explain.

Thanks in advance for any answers.