How to register paid users

[altoolsupply]

I am re-doing a website/forum for an organization that has a paid membership.
As part of their membership, their dues would include them full access to the website/forum.
The members already have existing membership id numbers. How do I get them from the logging in/registering process, to granting full access of the entire website/forum upon completion of their registration? I am using vB4.1.0.
Thanks...

[Da-Vinci]

Paid Subscriptions sounds like the best way forward.

Admin CP>Paid Subscriptions

Set up a usergroup that has full access to the site, then when a paid subscription is received set them to be moved to the usergroup with full access.

[altoolsupply]

I looked at the subsciption section but didn't find any manner of marking the user as being paid.
I'd like to know how their system validates a user upon logging in as being a "paid" user. There's got to be some way that it can cross reference the user id and with their paid subscription. In my case, I could have a custom field on the initial registration, i.e. "Membership ID Nmber", and a valid membership id number would serve as the payment.
I didn't see any vBulletin customer numbers being assigned in the subscription section. I wondering if the vBulletin software is more "hobbyish" than business natured.
Thanks...

[Staxed]

If you are wanting vbulletin to auto-assign new members to a 'paid' usergroup on signup based on adding a custom field with a 'verified membership ID'...you would have to custom code the script that checks if it's a verified ID or not.

The subscription system in vbulletin requires the payment to be made through vbulletin itself, so if you are doing the payment on another site and the granting forum access from that, you will have to have a custom integration made for that to work.

[altoolsupply]

The organization's central office receives a direct payment of membership dues via check or credit card. There is no intermediate online service involved with these transactions.

By having a custom field, i.e. organization member id, a conditional statement could be used in the field to validate a the member's id number. If valid id numbers were placed in a folder, the condition could search the folder id's and would act as a go/no go for registering. The folder could be uploaded weeking, replacing the existing folder, keeping the membership status current. I don't think the conditional coding would be too difficult, basically, "if this... do that".
I was hoping I could use vBulletin's exisiting validation method to get them through the registration process without the use of a moderator.

[Staxed]

As long as you had a central location for the membership numbers, you could have someone make you a mod that automatically promotes a member to a specific usergroup (your paid group) via a cron job.

You might have some luck trying to get this done by posting a request in the paid requests section or a freelancer site.