I was wondering if someone could shed some light on this one for me.
We have been using QF for a few years to invoice our customers for fixed, recurring payments.
We are now setting up a new business which is a telephone answering service. Customers will sign up at a fixed rate per month but if they have more calls to us, we will need to invoice them accordingly - on top of their monthly fee.
I thought that a good way to ensure payment would be to integrate our QF account with a GoCardless one. We haven’t used GoCardless before.
My assumption (and hope) is that we could invoice our customers in QF and then the amount would automatically be debited from their account, assuming they had signed up to a Direct Debit with us, through GoCardless. Is that correct?
Presumably the customer would sign-up to Direct Debits through our web site (using an integrated GoCardless form) and then everything would be ready to go?
GoCardless is certainly a good way to collect funds for recurring or even one-off costs.
You’re on the right lines. As long as a direct debit is set up through GoCardless and QuickFile knows about it, then we can request the funds using this method. However, it’s not automatic for one-off invoices - you have to click a one or two extra buttons to request the funds (but it’s straightforward).
With recurring invoices on the other hand, this can be automated and we can request the funds at the point of the invoice being generated.
You could do this, but it’s not a requirement. QuickFile can send your clients a link to set it up, or you can copy and paste the link into an email of your own if you prefer.
If you’re using our API, you can also request the link through an API call.
A few things to note with GoCardless however:
Initially, a direct debit mandate is capped at £5,000 per month, but this can be increased by GoCardless
They can take a few days (typically 3-5 working days) to clear to your bank account
I hope that helps, but please do let us know if you have further questions
Thank you for getting back to me and so quickly, too.
Brilliant, all looks good to me.
Just to clarify, we can set this up and then invoice the customer and payments will be paid ‘automatically’ by which I mean, the customer will not need to do anything for us to take payment from them?
That’s correct. Providing the direct debit is all set up, you can collect the funds and we’ll notify you when they clear. We’ll even tag them to the invoice for you too
this may be slightly off topic, but I used to use the Sage add-on for GoCardless.
If you are VAT registered and use the Cash-VAT scheme, then GoCardless didn’t process the VAT elements of the payments from customers inside the Sage software. As such I had to manually adjust to create a correct VAT return. It worked fine for another company that was using the standard accrual VAT scheme, it was just the cash-VAT scheme that had the issue.
I’m not sure if this would be the case with a QF - GoCardless integration, but it might be worth keeping an eye out.
When we request the funds automatically for a recurring invoice, it’s for the total balance - VAT inclusive.
For a one-off invoice, it would be for the value you enter. If this includes VAT, then we’ll include it and tag it as required.
When it comes to the VAT return, although on cash accounting the payment itself says it has to be accounted for, it’s the invoice that dictates how much, as this states the VAT rate and amount.
If it’s standard UK VAT, then there should be no need to adjust your returns in QuickFile, in most cases. But of course, always double check your calculations just to be sure.
