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Taking Autogiro Payments

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Last editedMay 20221 min read

Notifying your customers of payments

Before you're able to collect an Autogiro payment from a customer, you must give them "Advance Notice". The scheme rules require that your customer is informed of each payment before it leaves their account.

If your payments vary, either in frequency or amount, advance notice of 8 working days is required before each payment. The notice must contain the payment date and amount. Unlike SEPA or UK Direct Debit, with Autogiro this notification period cannot be reduced by an extra agreement with your bank.

There are, however, two exceptions to this rule:

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.
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.

Notice given, either in writing or electronically, should be as clear as possible.

Submitting payment requests to the banks

Payment requests are submitted to the banks through Bankgirot. Each request is routed to your sponsor bank and your customer's bank. On the day the payment is due, your bank will credit your account. Your customer's bank will then debit your customer's account. The two banks will then settle-up between themselves.

More detail on the submission process is available here.

Post-submission

If a payment is successful your account will simply be credited. No further messages will be received. If, on the other hand, a payment fails, Bankgirot will send a message detailing the failure. For full details on how these messages are received, and their meanings, see our guide on how to handle Autogiro reports from Bankgirot.

Taking Autogiro payments through GoCardless

GoCardless can process Autogiro payments on your behalf, including:

Registering mandates - GoCardless will handle mandate registration with Bankgirot on your behalf.
Notifying customers - GoCardless will send customers a bank-approved advance notice of each payment (optional).
Submitting payment requests - GoCardless will handle all submissions to Bankgirot on your behalf.
Managing payments - GoCardless automatically handles reports from Bankgirot and shows you the status of all of your payments. We also make it easy for you to cancel, retry or refund payments within our system.

GoCardless also allows you to collect payments using other Direct Debit schemes, including SEPA (for the Eurozone) and Bacs (for the UK). To find out more about collecting Autogiro with GoCardless visit GoCardless.se.