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Automatically collect payments with GoCardless
Automatically collect payments with GoCardless

Learn how to set up automatic payment collection using membermeister's GoCardless integration

Paul avatar
Written by Paul
Updated over a week ago


Membermeister's GoCardless integration gives you two options to collect payments:

  • Option 1: Your customers can pay you each time they receive an invoice by clicking a button to approve the payment. 

  • Option 2: You can automatically collect payments from your customers by issuing and sending them an invoice. This option means your customers do not have to manually approve the payment each time you invoice them. 

This article focuses on option 2: automatic collection of payments. 

Note: You should inform your customers that you plan to collect payments automatically as opposed to the more common workflow of them approving each payment. With automatic payment your customers have no control over when the payment is made - it is down to you to decide when to charge them. 

Prerequisites 

  1. Make sure your account is GoCardless enabled

  2.  Communicate to your customers that you intend to automatically collect payments.

  3. Please contact the membermeister team to enable this in your account.

How does it work?

When your customer pays their first invoice online via our GoCardless integration, a flexible Direct Debit mandate is created. This mandate authorises you to take payments from your customers by issuing and sending an invoice.

Note: This is not an automatically recurring Direct Debit payment. All payments, automatic or customer-approved, are triggered by issuing an invoice.

Collecting automatic payments

To automatically collect a payment all you need to do is select the option "Enable automatic payment collection for this invoice" whenever you send an invoice.

Next you want to use 'Collect using a single payment'.

The second option allows you to automatically take payments via instalments.

Note: After sending your invoice, we will attempt to automatically collect payment.
If the payment is successful then the invoice will go into a pending payment state. You will notice that the new payment state appears after you refresh the page. This process can take a few minutes. 

Sending multiple invoices at the same time

The 'auto-pay' option is also available when you send multiple invoices at the same time, for example for your termly invoice run.
The screen recording below shows the workflow for this.


New customers vs existing customers

Generally when you send out your termly invoices you might have a mix of new customers and existing customers.

New customers

A new customer who receives an invoice for the first time has the option to pay the invoice. By paying the invoice a Direct Debit mandate is created and you can collect payments for future invoices automatically.

Reminder: you need to inform your customers if you intend to collect payments automatically.

Below is a picture of the email a new customer will receive.

Note: If you do not check the "Automatically collect payment by Direct Debit" when sending an invoice, then all customers will see a Pay now button as shown in the above picture. Clicking this button will prompt them to approve the payment.

Existing customers

An existing customer which has previously paid an invoice via GoCardless will already have a Direct Debit mandate in place. This means that membermeister can attempt to automatically collect the payment - if you choose to use this option as described above.

When the invoice is sent it will contain a message similar to the one below.

You should now know everything there is about collecting payments automatically with GoCardless in membermeister.


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