Payment Timings

Pre-Authorized Debit timings

Please note timings below are industry standard for Canadian Pre-Authorized Debits. To view PAD payment timings with GoCardless please visit our support centre.

It's also important to note that Pre-Authorized Debit is not an instant payment method. Payments will always take at least one working day from the collection date to arrive in your bank account.

Advance Notice

You must notify your customer before submitting a Pre-Authorized Debit payment. By default, the notice period is 10 calendar days, which can be reduced if agreed with your customer.

Exceptions can be made for fixed payment schedules where a customer has already been notified. For example, you've previously told them that $100 would be collected on the 1st of every month). Changing this amount or date requires 10 days’ advance notice, unless the customer has directly asked for the change.

For electronic agreements, you must give confirmation at least 15 calendar days before taking the first payment. This can be reduced to a minimum of 3 calendar days, provided you’ve got appropriate identity verification procedures in place, and have informed the customer.

ACSS payment submission deadlines

Submission deadlines will differ according to your sponsor bank. In general, you’ll need to submit your files the day before or the morning when the payment is due. Your bank may only submit payment requests on the payment due date (or the next business day if the due date falls on a weekend or holiday).

Successful payments will show on your bank statement within 1 day of the collection date. It’s important to remember that there are no notifications for unsuccessful payments, only for returned ones.

What’s more, return notifications may not be received until day 1 or 2 after the attempted collection date. Due to these rules, it can take up to 3 days for you to confirm that a Pre-Authorized Debit payment has been successfully processed.

Timeline of the Pre-Authorized Debit collection process

• 10 calendar days before collection - This is the last day you can send a notification of payment to your customer. (Timing can be reduced in agreement with customer.) The advanced notification period for Pre-Authorized Debit through GoCardless is only 3 calendar days as standard.

• 1 business day before collection / Day of collection (morning) - This is the day you can send a payment instruction to your bank.

• Day of collection - Day on which the payer's bank attempts to debit the customer’s account.

• 1-3 business days after collection - You will be notified via ACSS if the transaction has failed.

• 30 days after collection - This is the last day you can retry a payment if it failed due to non-sufficient funds. A payment can only be retried once.

Non-working days

No submissions can be made on non-working days, as the banks won’t process any Pre-Authorized Debit payments on these days.

Payment timings using GoCardless

Using GoCardless to manage your Pre-Authorized Debits takes away the complexity of the processes we’ve explained in the sections above.

We process Canadian payments according to Eastern Standard Time (EST) on Canadian business days only (any day other than a Saturday, Sunday or federal statutory holiday).

With GoCardless, there’s a three-day confirmation period after the customer completes the electronic mandate, after which the payment can be submitted. The payment will then be credited to your account three working days after it is submitted.