Using the Pending status for membership approval

[Upperholme]

I need to set up a membership approval process whereby the user completes a form and makes the payment online, but the membership is not active until it has been approved by an administrator.

As far as I can see there is still no explicit mechanism for handling membership approvals, so, having read this thread (http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,32324.msg138388.html) I'm wondering if i can simply place the 'Pending' membership status at the top of the list, and this will mean the membership does not start even though the payment has been received. Once it is approved the admin can change the status, and if need be update the start/end dates so that the member can enjoy the full membership term.

Is it this straightforward, or is the 'Pending' status, which I note is not editable, unsuitable for this approach?

Very interested to learn how others have approached membership approval.

[CiviTeacher.com]

In our case, memberships are seldom rejected.  So I found a workaround.  When someone becomes a member they are placed in a custom status you create called "Under Review" that lasts for 7 days. 

After that time, they switch to "Current" automatically status per your CiviCRM Membership Status Rules. 

During this 7 days "Under Review" has no member access or rights.  If an administrator reviews their application in these 7 day period and finds it unacceptable, the administrator edits the membership status to "Cancelled".  Otherwise the membership naturally becomes "Current" automatically after 7 days.

Tell your members "the review period lasts 7 days after which your membership will be active".  They find this generally acceptable.

[Upperholme]

Thanks for this. Your suggested approach won't be appropriate in my use case. Approval meeds to be an explicit process rather than a default step.

Actually I'm quite surprised that there is nothing already built in to the membership process to handle an approval requirement, as there is with event sign-ups for example.

[CiviTeacher.com]

After using CiviCRM since 2008, nothing surprises me anymore. 

Experiment with the duration of the "under review" status and the order in which the status rules apply.  What if "under review" lasted for 7 years? 

[Upperholme]

I'm doing just that. It's little clunky but will work. The administrator will need to manually adjust the start and end dates upon approval, which is less than ideal, but I'm sure it will work.