Reinforced concrete members may be subjected to cracking damage due to environmental attack and past loading. Recent experiments conducted by the authors show that the shear behaviour of pre-cracked beams differs greatly from the uncracked ones. In an uncracked beam, the shear failure is governed by a single diagonal crack. On the other hand, the shear failure of pre-cracked beams is governed by a mutual contribution of pre-crack and diagonal crack or by the pre-crack only. The behaviour of all the pre-cracked beams can be consistently explained by the concept of shear anisotropy along the pre-crack plane. The pre-cracked beam problem poses challenges to the numerical analysis of reinforced concrete members. The finite element method (FEM) is discussed in this paper. It is made clear that a crack model that can handle the pre-cracked beam problem must be able to record and transfer pre-crack and other state variables over load steps, treat multi-directional cracks with mutual interaction and treat shear anisotropy along the pre-crack plane. The four-way fixed crack approach is proposed for numerical analysis. The analysis target includes non-orthogonal two-way crack interaction, three-way crack interaction and crack interaction in which two cracks form an arbitrary angle.