CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I would like to tie a membership to a corresponding payment. In other words, as long as the payment is not competed, the membership status is "pending".

I intend to retrieve money from the member's accounts via a direct debit process - this is an offine procedure where I send an EDIFACT file to my bank which takes care of the transaction.

Regarding the payment status, I would set it to "pending" from the beginning. As soon as the direct debit is in progress, the status is set to "in progress".

I understand that I would need a payment processor to allow members to register online. For the time being, it sufficient to handle membership issues on the backend by a CiviCRM admin, so I think I can do it without a payment processor.

I am quite new here and I spent some days coming up with this plan - In order to avoid strategic mistakes, I would like to ask some questions:

(1) does this make sense to you at all or is it any violation to a CiviCRM concept or something that I would regret in a future version...?
(2) it seems to me that my plan should be working almost out-of-the-box - aside from
(2a) create corresponding "pending" payment record *automatically* - how can I tick the "record payment" checkbox automatically, so that payment fields show up?
(2b) It seems illogical to overwrite the status manually because it drops out of automatic status progression. - How can I set status of new memberships to "pending" (because of no complete payment) *automatically*?
(2c) set membership.is_pay_later if there is no approval for direct debit - how can I make this flag accessible in the form?
(2d) How can I set default values in the form (recieve date => empty, payment instrument => direct debit, tx status => pending/in progress)
(2e) ... maybe something else
(3) in the search form for contributions, there is no way to search for status "in progress" - is this a bug/missing feature?

Most thankful for all kinds of responses!

Reinhard.