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Direct Debit: A Beginner's Guide

Introduction to Taking Payments with Direct Debit

Chris Hooper
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Last editedApr 20231 min read

The three things you need to know about taking payments with Direct Debit - also known as ACH Debit or bank debit.

Once you have a Direct Debit mandate set up with your customer, you can collect Direct Debit payments from them at any time.

There are three things you need to know about taking payments with Direct Debit:

  1. You need to give customers advance notice of changes - If you make changes to either the payment frequency or payment amount, you must notify your customer about it before taking further payments. What constitutes a change depends on what the original debit authorization specified. Learn more about customer payment notifications.

  2. Payments are not instant - Payments may take more than 3 working days to clear on your bank account. Learn more about ACH Debit payment processing times.

  3. You must submit payment requests in a specific format - Starting with having an origination agreement in place with a bank, you must follow Nacha's (the organization which runs the ACH scheme) file format to be able to successfully collect a Direct Debit payment. Learn more about submitting ACH payment requests to the bank.

How to collect Direct Debit payments with GoCardless

1.

Create your free GoCardless account, access your user-friendly payments dashboard & connect your accounting software (if you use one).

2.

Easily set up & schedule Direct Debit payments via payment pages on your website checkout or secure payment links.

3.

From now on you'll get paid on time, every time, as GoCardless automatically collects payment on the scheduled date. Simple.

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Take Direct Debit payments easily

GoCardless can process Direct Debit payments on your behalf, including:

  • Notifying customers - GoCardless sends your customers advance notice of each payment.

  • Submitting payment requests - GoCardless handles all submissions to the bank on your behalf.

  • Fast collection - GoCardless has optimized the ACH debit collection process to collect funds as fast as possible.

Learn more about taking ACH Debit payments with GoCardless - the easy way to collect payments via Direct Debit.

Over 85,000 businesses use GoCardless to get paid on time. Learn more about how you can improve payment processing at your business today.

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Interested in automating the way you get paid? GoCardless can help
Interested in automating the way you get paid? GoCardless can help

Interested in automating the way you get paid? GoCardless can help

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