Hi.
I am a veteran embedded systems designer with over 10 years experience. Mostly i work with AVR controllers (the base of Arduino) and at times also with Arduino for non-commercial or simpler projects.
I have myself used the RFID shield from Sparkfun on a custom designed AVR board for a client sometime back. So i have the idea. In that particular project, the client needed the card to be verified against a list of numbers stored in an MS Access database on a server and then based on time of day, determine whether to let the user enter a door or not. This was an Access control application.
If you want your Arduino to take the decision and act upon it, then one method can be to store card numbers in the built-in (or separately attached I2C EEPROM) like AT24c256 or similar. Each card swipe will present the number to the Arduino, which it can lookup in the list and perform necessary action.
If on teh other hand, you need the Arduino to get the card number, then send it to a laptop to verify, then the laptop can reply with a YES or NO and the Arduino can take needed action, then a software to run on the laptop will also need to be developed, probably in VB or C#. This gives benefit of using a database software like MySQL or Access or SQL Server and lots of processing power on the computer end for complex things like time-of-day access list.
Whatever your requirement, i will be glad to help.
If you like, you may add me on skype and we can discuss. My ID is TopGunPk. Thanks