Every organisation has an annual cycle, even if it isn't as defined as the academic year of a school or a university. It may be driven by annual events, product launches, the budgeting cycle, or by the seasons themselves, For membership organizations, there may well be a peak renewals month, or the AGM or conference, or the annual audit procedure, or the trustees strategy meeting. 

Wouldn't it be be nice to avoid all that merging and updating before the renewals round, or to register conference attendees online and collect card payments, or to improve newsletter circulation and have members-only content as part of the membership proposition? All of these things can be automated with a new AMS (Association Management System) using the latest cloud-based or SaaS services, and for not much money (see Wild Apricot as an example here).

 While these systems are easy to run once in place, changing your AMS is a project, and it needs to be planned as one, and it will need time - evaluation time, decision time, setup time, migration time and test time. And as my old boss used to say, the reason most projects finish late is that they start late...