Recommendations for Setting Up Trust Accounts

Following are recommendations for handling situations when a member wants to set up a membership where the primary member and the first joint owner are, in essence, the same person. This happens most often for trust accounts. Currently in CU*BASE there are two ways to handle trusts:

For trusts that use a person's SSN (where you do not have a separate TIN for the trust), set up the account as an individual account, and use the DBA name field for the trust name. We also recommend that you use a separate Membership Designation code that allows only individual membership types to be created, with a primary member label of “Trustee” and joint owner label of “Trustee.” (See below for more information.)
For trusts that use a TIN/EIN, set up the account as an organizational account. Then set up normal joint owners using their SSNs. We do not recommend using the DBA name field at all in these situations because if you elect to display DBA names on correspondence, any text in that field replaces the primary member name (with the exception of Misc. Member Account Forms, where both the name and DBA name can be printed). In addition, use a separate Membership Designation code that allows only organizational membership types to be created, with a primary member label of “Trust Name” and joint owner label of “Trustee.” (See below for more information.)

Using Separate Membership Designations to Track Trusts

To allow you to handle these two types of trusts differently, we recommend that you create two separate Membership Designation codes for trusts: one for organizational trusts, and another for individual trusts, as in the following examples:

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Not only will this method make the labels more accurate for member service staff, but the separate codes also let you track these memberships separately for other reporting and analysis purposes.

If you still have organizational memberships that use a single, generic trust designation, use these instructions to handle the transition:

Create a membership designation code to be used only for Organizational trust accounts.
Update any existing organizational memberships to use the new code. (HINT: Query your MASTER file for records where the MASTYP = MO and the MBRDESG = TR.)
Change your existing generic Trust designation code to use different labels and only allow Individual membership types. (This can only be done if there are no MO records using this code.)
For these memberships, enter the Trust name into the DBA name field.

CU*TIP: If you choose to create a new separate code for individual trusts, when you delete your old code CU*BASE will automatically request a code to which all existing memberships can be moved.