Today we’ve made a couple of enhancements to our GoCardless integration. The basis of these changes is to allow a payment request to be made against a Direct Debit pre-authorisation today but scheduled at a specific date in the future.
When you preview an unpaid invoice belonging to a client with whom you have a Direct Debit pre-authorisation, you will see an option in the menu to collect payment via Direct Debit.
A dialogue screen will appear with the options to “Request now” or “Schedule collection for later”. With the latter you can now specify an exact date upon which to request the funds.
Deferring collection on Recurring Invoices
The second part of this update allows you to configure a deferment period in days so that the Direct Debit collection request is made n number of days after any invoice is created from the template.
Previously any collection request was made as soon as the invoice was created. To use this facility change the default value for “Initiate request after” from 0 to your chosen number of days.
We hope this provide greater flexibility to our GoCardless integration and welcome any further feedback.
Great new feature! QF leads the way with intuitive, time savings features. Could it be that if maybe an agreement has been made for customer to pay instalment using this feature? As GoCarldess stand alone is very good for this if you have large customer invoices and a flexible arrangement.
Installments could well be the next iteration. You can kind of achieve this at the moment using recurring invoices, this is used extensively for subscription type services. However with this you’re basically issuing multiple invoices rather than one single invoice.
Great, one question. Can multiple payments to a single customer be grouped? As each DD costs, it would be good if i have 4 invoices for a customer logged in the first half of the month, knowing that on a set date all those invoices will be taken in one go.
Just a thought (right now i do most of them manually because of this!)
Wouldn’t that depend on the transaction amounts? It’s 1% up to £2. So 2x£200 transactions would cost you £4 not £2 (if it were combined into one £400).
Yes with the capping that would make a difference, I missed that one.
I doubt that consolidating this way would be easy to add into our system as recurring invoices are created in no particular order and it would be complicated to look ahead in every case, store the aggregate totals, issue one payment request then intelligently split on the other side when the lump sum comes in. I’m a programmer and I can see that this would be a total mess to handle, it would introduce a big margin for errors which for payment collections we’re not keen on taking risks.
If you’re collecting 2 payments together for the same client, why not create just one recurring invoice?
My specific reason is simple, we’re a services provider. So the monthly recurring costs (lets say for a hosted phone system) are on the date the service started. However, the date on which we invoice their calls (variable amount) is always the 1st. There for, we take payment for both on a set date during the month. As both amounts can be quite large, we do it as one DD (not two).
Anyway, that’s my reason, I appreciate if it’s technically difficult.
