Issue with Direct Debit customers single invoices

We are having issues with the majority of our Direct Debit customers not paying one off invoices.

Pretty much all our customers simply forget to pay one-off invoices when they have direct debits enabled.

I would love to be able to set per client the option to collect ALL recurring and single invoices by Direct Debit.

We have been told explicitly by customers to collect all their invoices and the number of our customers getting annoyed and saying “But we set up Direct Debit” is starting to effect business and cash flow. It is also adding a lot on manual work going through clients and remembering which clients we explicitly need to manually collect.

Can you please add the function to colllect all invoices by Direct Debit after xx days.

Similar problem for us in customer behaviour. A couple of customers have used the pay online option for one invoice and then just don’t pay subsequent ones. I am not sure what they think that they have done, the words “direct debit” are used when signing up to GoCardless but it doesn’t appear to give a recurring authority for me to take payments.

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I think the problem is the direct debit can be used for a lot of things in a few different ways. 99% of people though just know it as being used for taking payments for anything from that company, just because that is what 99% of companies/suppliers use it for.

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I just want to clarify the last point here if you don’t mind? Are you seeing this somewhere in your QuickFile or GoCardless account?

The words direct debit appear after clicking “pay online” if you haven’t previously registered. I think that this is on the GC side. I am away from my laptop so can’t check.

Trouble is that customer A may expect to make each payment and choose the payment date. Customer B may expect me to take payment when due
Damned if I do and damned if I don’t

As part of the terms of GoCardless, and I believe the Direct Debit system, we have to use the wording “Direct Debit”. This is something we’ve explored in the past.

Although if they do pay by Direct Debit, then a mandate is set up. It used to be that it was used for a one-off payment and cancelled when it was complete, but GoCardless changed this around 2 years ago.

Mattew,
You are talking about the specific of a single transaction like a card payment. We are talking about a slightly different situation.

Client has a recurring invoice with direct Debit collection and this is working well and as expected both parties are happy. We then sell them an additional item that generates a 1 off invoice. (Their is no option to add alternation to next recurring invoice)

The problem is that 1 off invoice does not get paid as they think it will be collected from Direct Debit. we have to manually go through each individual invoice selecting option to collect via direct Debit.

It would much better if we could set a setting on the account to collect all invoices via Direct Debit

Hi @MearTech

Understood! :+1:

As always, we’ll leave this thread open for others to comment and add their vote.

Both have the same end result, one off invoice for a customer expecting a DD. I would certainly like to be able to have a per-customer setting as we have several customers with a mix of regular orders and one-offs, to whom we haven’t offered GoCardless for this reason as well as the few who are vague about which side should be initiating a one-off DD.

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