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Direct Debit for marketing agencies and accountancy firms

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The GoCardless content team comprises a group of subject-matter experts in multiple fields from across GoCardless. The authors and reviewers work in the sales, marketing, legal, and finance departments. All have in-depth knowledge and experience in various aspects of payment scheme technology and the operating rules applicable to each. The team holds expertise in the well-established payment schemes such as UK Direct Debit, the European SEPA scheme, and the US ACH scheme, as well as in schemes operating in Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. See full bio

Last editedApr 20231 min read

Direct Debit helps hundreds of marketing agencies and accountancy firms to reduce late payments and admin.

GoCardless helps hundreds of marketing agencies and accountancy firms to take control of their payments by switching to online Direct Debit. This helps them in two ways:

Reduce late payments
Reduce payment and accounting admin

1. Reduce late payments

60% of SMEs suffering from serious cash flow issues blame late payments. Without reliable cash flow, agencies often struggle to grow their business – or worse, pay their staff.

As a result, an increasing number of agencies and firms are turning to Direct Debit to take control of when they are paid. With Direct Debit, once you have authorisation from your customer, you can collect payments whenever they are due.

Zest Digital, a growing marketing agency, switched to Direct Debit with GoCardless and cut its average debtor days by 39%. Founder Alex Minchin explains the impact:

“We're now in control of what comes in, and when. We cut our average debtor days by nearly 60%. As a result, we've bucked the trend for flat growth in the industry and doubled in size in six months.”

2. Reduce payment and accounting admin

Taking payments by cheque and bank transfer requires a lot of manual work. You need to cash cheques, check your bank every day to see what has cleared, and chase any non-payers. You can automate this whole process by switching to Direct Debit.

Some agencies choose to use card payments instead. Roughly 5-10% of these payments fail each month due to cards expiring or being cancelled. This is a bad experience for your customers, creates unnecessary work for them having to update their details and worst of all, if they forget, this may result in their payments lapsing. By contrast, Direct Debit payments use a customer’s bank details, which rarely expire or change.

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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How to get started with Direct Debit

You can get access to the Direct Debit system via a bank, a bureau or GoCardless. If you would like to find out more about any of these options you may find our 60 second guide to Direct Debit providers helpful.

GoCardless is the UK’s leading Direct Debit payments provider. It lets you automate the whole payment process and manage everything online and offers:

Quick and easy sign up - You can sign up instantly and for free.
Easy and efficient management - You can collect recurring and one-off payments automatically, or at the click of a button. We manage everything else for you.
Simple, low pricing - See full details of our competitive pricing options here.
Integration with accounting packages. GoCardless integrates with the most popular accounting packages to enable easy invoicing and payment reconciliation (e.g. Sage, Xero and KashFlow).