ARUDD messages: The two most common reasons your payments are failing

ARUDD is the automated system used by the banks to return unpaid Direct Debit payments. When a payment fails, an ARUDD report is automatically triggered (the day after the payment was due to be collected) listing any failed payments and corresponding reason codes.

There are 12 ARUDD reason codes you may come across, however, most of these are relatively rare. We thought it would be helpful to look at the two most commonly received ARUDD codes and what you can do to avoid or resolve these.

0 – Refer to Payer

This reason code usually means a payment has failed because your customer has insufficient funds in their account (although it can occasionally be used as a catch-all for other failures). It is, by far, the most common reason for Direct Debit payments failing.

• How to avoid: Allowing your customers to choose a payment date which suits their needs and income (e.g. the day after they are paid), and giving advance notice correctly, should help to avoid this.

• How to resolve: Contact your customer to arrange to re-try the payment. Before retrying, you should check with your customer that they now have the funds to pay you as repeated failed payments can lead to bank charges.

1 – Instruction cancelled

If a customer cancels a mandate via their bank, you will receive an ADDACs report notifying you of the cancellation. If you take a payment after failing to check your reports or apply a cancellation request, the payment will fail.

• How to avoid: Check any reports regularly and apply any cancellations immediately (or at least within three days).

• How to resolve: To retry a cancelled payment, you’ll need to contact the customer and ask them to set up a new Direct Debit instruction.

GoCardless helps you to avoid failed payments

GoCardless processes Direct Debit payments on your behalf, including:

• Optimising payment timings. GoCardless submits payment requests for you according to our optimised payment timetable. This means we will never send in a payment request too early or too late.

• Immediately processing failure reports on your behalf. GoCardless immediately processes any reports from the banks and updates your payment statuses so you know exactly what's going on.

• Handling any payment failures for you. GoCardless manages any payment failures for you and our simple system reduces failure rates to less than 1%.

If you would like to find out more about ARUDD reason codes you may find it helpful to read our guide to reports from the banks.