Critical for us - Basic functionality for webhook, gocardless, direct debit

We really need a basic webhook to tell us when a customer has new direct debit setup with gocardless.

You guys have been pushing gocardless really hard, especially lately. It is so strange to not have this in the webhook API.

It is a matter of life and death for our business for this to be added, otherwise we’ll be forced to switch accountant software, which I really don’t want to do.

Quoting mathew:

In addition, we don’t want to poll every single customer - we have 100’s, every day - requesting all fields. I think that would not be good for your servers bandwidth either.

GoCardless have a webhook system of their own so if you can’t get this information from QuickFile webhooks you could maybe try those. I’m not sure whether there’s enough info in the GC webhook to link you to the right QF client but could be worth a try.

I’m not very technical but wouldn’t this be more of a gocardless thing rather than quickfile? Its gocardless who does the mandates and things rather than quickfile itself

We only need webhook from quickfile to get notification from gocarldess to know when a direct debit is activated (created by customer).

Quickfile manage gocardless implementation and communication, and because each customer can use a different email address when signing up to gocardless mandate, we can’t cross reference the email ID to each customer. So we have to go by quickfile.

Quickfile offer ability to ‘poll’ this data, but polling is much different to webhook, and it is a big server load to just get 1 bit of data of “gocardless mandate active”

In addition, a webhook is near real time, each second, whereas polling a client is not good to do more than once an hour.
We really need to know instantly when customer has signed up so there’s no delay.

It may be worth trying to set up GC webhooks anyway - from my brief read of their API docs it looks like any metadata that QuickFile supply to GC when creating the mandate would feed through to their webhook call - @QFSupport do you include the QF client ID in the metadata when calling GoCardless?

Hi @ian_roberts

We don’t supply metadata at the moment, although this could be something we can look at if there’s interest in this.

We are however working on allowing an existing mandate to be added to a client through our API, so you could set the mandate up using the GoCardless API and push the mandate ID back to the QuickFile API when it’s set up. That should resolve this issue.

We’ll update this post when this has been done.

We’d really appreciate the metadata so we don’t have to keep polling (traffic intensive) QuickFile to know when a mandate has been setup.

Or just add the direct debit status as a webhook.