CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

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.

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.

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.