Can the date be extracted, useful for sorting. Alpha isn't always suitable. I've allocated Nos. in a register. Extracts come out in Alpha, which means the member number in the register changes. (in the extract)

For the membership secretary this is an important search to know how many new members the club has.

To do a similar thing i use smart search in Contacts, then use the Member Since field. Then I can put in search dates to see when the member first joined. This works well enough, but it would be good to know when they paid their first Subscription (this may not be at the same time as they created a contact record). I sometimes get confused as to whether the result of the search is w hen they created their contact record, or when they first paid for a subscription.