GoCardless Direct Debit Payments

In Accelerate you can integrate with Gocardless for taking scheduled payments for a contract via Direct Debit.

You will need a Gocardless account, this article will show you how to set things up so you can collect scheduled payments via Direct Debit using Accelerate.

Initial Setup

Go to Settings and click the Gocardless settings button at the top of the page. This will take you through to the settings page. Click on the Connect to Gocardless button. This will redirect you to a Gocardless page which will also show some QV Systems branding. You will be prompted to either sign-up or login with your Gocardless credentials in order to connect your account to Accelerate via the Quotevine app in Gocardless.

When you connect the account you will be re-directed back to the settings page.

Webhook

There is one final step which must be done to complete the integration. Acclerate requires a webhook. Log in to your Gocardless account and navigate to Developers and create a new webhook, name it QV Systems (or some other meaningful name). Copy the Webhook URL from Settings | Gocardless in Accelerate and paste it into the webhook URL then save it, you can leave the webhook secret blank and a secret will be generated by Gocardless. Select your new endpoint in Gocardless and copy the Secret into the Webhook Secret in your Gocardless settings in Accelerate.

Open

Settings

Gocardless Settings

There are a few settings which affect how the system behaves.

Verification Status

This returned by clicking the Get Verification Status button. It can be one of 3 values:

• successful: Your account is fully verified, and can receive payouts.

• in_review: You have provided all of the information requested by GoCardless, and your account is awaiting review by GoCardless before you can receive payouts.

• action_required: You need to provide further information to GoCardless to verify your account so you can receive payouts, and should visit the GoCardless verification flow.

Request Payment Days Prior

This sets how many days prior to the payment date the request will be transmitted to Gocardless. The minimum is 4 days as that allows for the time taken by both Gocardless and the bank. It must be noted that once a request is transmitted to Gocardless it is no-longer possible to change the payment in Accelerate.

Mandate Creation Message

When a mandate request is sent out to a customer this appears on the first page of the mandate setup flow.

Min Days Between Payments

To avoid accidentally taking payments too close together the system will not attempt to take payments fewer than this setting's days apart.

Auto Retry

This controls whether the system will attempt to retry failed payments automatically.

Retry Type

This may be set as ‘Configured’ or ‘GoCardless Intelligent’.

If set to GoCardless Intelligent, then this feature must be enabled in your GoCardless account.

If set to Configured then accelerate will retry according to what is set as Retry Lag Days and number of retries.

Email Templates

It is necessary to setup an email template including the tag  #DD_MANDATE_URL#. This will be replaced by a unique URL for the customer to use to setup their mandate.

Direct Debit Mandates

In order for payment to be taken a mandate must be set up by the customer. The is initiated from within Accelerate using the email button on the relationship, and then selecting the email templated created above.

Upon clicking the link in the email the customer will be presented with a page from Gocardless. The Logo at the top is setup in your Gocardless account and the message comes from the Mandate creation message. The customer name and email will be pre-filled from their relationship data.

Once the customer has completed the mandate form the mandate will appear against their relationship. If it's the first mandate they have in Accelerate it will automatically be selected as active. If for any reason they create a second mandate then only one may be selected as active at any one time and the second mandate must be manually selected as the active one on the Direct Debit Mandate details page. This page also shows the Gocardless ID for the mandate and various relevant details. The history of events supplied over the webhook is shown below. The Fetch From Provider button will make a call directly to Gocardless for the current status, but this would not normally be necessary to use.

Payments are taken using the Active mandate at the time the payment is transmitted.

Contracts

Any contract may have Direct Debit payments activated once the relationship has an Active mandate. The first payment will be scheduled upon save of any scheduled payment. Subsequent payments are scheduled automatically. Direct Debit payments can only be taken for scheduled payments due on or after the mandate's next possible charge date.

NB. If a payment is created or edited to have it's Due Date within the window of the Request Payments Days Prior and Next Possible DD Date it will be transmitted immediately upon saving the contract payment and hence it will not be possible to edit further.

Scheduled payments will continue to be taken automatically so long as there is a valid Active mandate. Once a payment has been transmitted it will show on the Contracts screen with it's current status

Direct Debit Payments

Direct Debit payments are always directly linked to a scheduled contract payment. The status of the payment can be seen along with any history in the Edit Contract Payment screen. The event history as provided by Gocardless via the webhook is also visible.

If a payment fails and auto-retry is not enabled then a re-try to take the payment may be initiated.

Reports

Mandates

Relevant information is displayed for each mandate, the linked contracts are a list of all contracts which have payments linked to the mandate

Payments

Relevant information for each payment. If no Provider Ref is present (status will also be 'pending') then the payment is prepared but not yet transferred to Gocardless.

Actions

Actions may be automatically initiated on change of status for both direct debit payments and mandates, so for instance if a payment fails a message or task can be created referencing the associated relationship/contract. For messages the tags #RELATIONSHIP_NAME# and #CONTRACT_NUMBER# may be used to identify the related relationship/contract respectively.