Autogiro Timings

Advance notice

Except for in the cases below, you must notify your customer before submitting a payment to be collected by Autogiro. By default, the amount of advance notice required is 8 working days.

Notable exceptions to this rule are:

• Explicitly authorised payments - if your customer has approved an Autogiro payment in conjunction with a purchase or order, you do not need to give advance notice. You will need to make it clear on the invoice that payment is to be made by Autogiro.

• Fixed payment schedules - for regular payments of a fixed amount, a single payment notification or invoice can be issued. This will need to contain details of the payment frequency and payment amount.

Cut-off to submit payments in Autogiro

Collecting an Autogiro payment against an existing mandate

A collection under an existing mandate must be submitted to the banks one working day before the date the payment is due. The relevant timings are:

• D-8 - This is the last day you can send a notification of payment to your customer (unless one of the exceptions listed above applies).

• D-1 - This is the deadline for payment initiation instructions to be received by Bankgirot.

• D - The day on which the payer's bank account is debited. This is also when you will be notified via Bankgirot if the transaction has been unsuccessful.

• D+3 - This is the final day on which you can retry a payment if it failed due to insufficient funds.

Under the Autogiro scheme, the payer is entitled to request a refund of an authorised collection within 8 weeks of their account being debited. The payer is also entitled to request a refund for an unauthorised or fraudulent collection from their bank account up to 13 months after the payment is taken.

Collecting payment when no mandate exists

If you don't already have a mandate with your customer, you must set up one before a payment can be collected. You must then wait up to 2 banking days to allow the mandate to be set up before submitting a payment request. This means a mandate can be set up and payment submitted within the eight day notification period.

For further details on how to set up a mandate, see our guide on Autogiro mandates.

Payment failure notifications

Once submitted, a payment may still fail due to the payer having insufficient funds in their bank account. The payer will need to have sufficient funds in their account at 0:01 on the day of the payment. If a payment fails for this reason then you will receive an update in the daily Payments Specification report. See our guide to reports from Bankgirot for more information.

You can retry failed payments once per day for up to three business days in the period following the payment due date.

Non-working days and optimising timings

Submissions to the banks cannot be made on non-working days, and the banks will not process any Autogiro messages on non-working days. Despite this it is possible to receive messages that were sent the previous day. For example, payment failure reports distributed overnight on a Friday are available to download on a Saturday morning.

Payment timings with GoCardless

GoCardless processes all Autogiro payments according to the fully optimised timetable above. We will receive the funds on the same day the customer's bank account is debited. On D+2 we will transfer all the payments we have collected into your account. Funds will therefore arrive in your account on D+3.

GoCardless can submit and receive messages from the banks on your behalf, complying with notification rules, interbank timing and cut-off times. This will give you absolute transparency on the status of your payments at any time, through our dashboard and API.

To find out more about collecting Autogiro with GoCardless visit GoCardless.com.