From an earlier response, it seems that an invoice which is being paid by direct debit, will initiate the payment process when the invoice is actually issued.
I can see this causing a ‘customer service issue’ since the expectations of most people is that an invoice dated (say) 1st January would state that collection will be made by direct debit on (say) 14th January.
Folks can be wary of Direct Debits, despite the Direct Debit Guarantee, and respecting what our customers may feel is mission critical for most businesses.
I am not sure if this a QuickFile or GoCardless issue.
In the meantime, I will e-mail our DD members on the normal date of the invoice with a ‘membership collection’ notice and then issue the actual DD enabled invoices a week or so later.
If you want me to raise the same point with GoCardless, please let me know.
Thank you for the feedback, this is however not something that is on our near-term agenda but we will eventually revisit, therefore I have updated the category to a feature.
At the moment when the recurring invoice is created, the DD payment request is also initiated. You could send your customer/s a direct debit schedule at the start to inform them of when future payments will be collected, you could also send them a letter 14 days prior to date when the recurring invoice will be issued to inform them of the DD collection, this method might not be ideal as it’s not automated.
This is an old thread but I just wanted to provide an update here.
We are currently working on a means to defer the collection of Direct Debit payments for recurring and single invoices. The way it will work is by allowing a deferment period (in days) to be specified on your recurring invoice template. That way the actual collection of the direct debit will be made n days after the invoice is issued.
You will also be able to manually make collections on single invoice and supply a date in the future upon which the collection will be initiated.