Currently the membership_log does not store the date that a change in status was effective, just the date the cron detected/set the new status

If the cron fails to run, then you don't know when the change in status should have occurred, for applying the rules of an organisation's constitution.

Ben Evans in our team has a Jira account and this task can be assigned to him.

We are proposing adding a column called effective_date which will be set as the effective date of the change in status based on the Membership Status Rules as at the date the cron automatically did an update, or if it detects a manual status override, set the date as NULL (or does the Membership Override screen record an entry in membership_log so the cron doesn't?).

We are proposing to contribute a patch to UpdateMembershipRecord.php to give effect to the above.