As a sys-admin to a site one of the things I had to do at times was to change the starting date to immediately when someone upgraded their memberships.   When a member upgrades to a higher level membership with increased access they often wanted the new higher level membership to start immediately so they could enjoy the new benefits.  The current platform coding has it set so that the current membership has to expire before the new membership is in place.  The reasoning here is to not short change the member with the number of days he/she paid for.  This is fine when the membership level does not change but may not always be desirable when the member wants to have access to the increased benefits immediately.  What is needed is a way for the member to decide if they want the higher level membership to take effect immediately or wait until the current membership expires.  A simple checkbox (such as is presented to admins when they manually set memberships levels) when the person buys the membership will allow the member to decide if they want to discard the remaining time of their current membership when upgrading; it won't be needed if the membership level does not change.