Package upgrades

Why did you upgrade my account? I never requested an account upgrade.

When you set up your account with GoCardless you would have been asked to select which package you would like, we would never automatically select a package for you. 

In some instances, you may not have met all the criteria for the Plus or Pro packages, at the time of initially opening the account, so there may have been a delay in this package being applied to your account. 

There are additional benefits to having the Plus or Pro packages, including the ability to have your own unique Service User Number (SUN) shown on your payers bank statements. However if you decide you would like to downgrade to a Standard account, please make this request via email to our Support Team at help@gocardless.com.

Why have you told my customers that I cancelled their Direct Debit and set up a new one following my account upgrade?

GoCardless offers four account packages; Standard, Plus, Pro and Custom. You can find an in-depth comparison of the GoCardless packages on our pricing page here.

GoCardless won’t send any notifications about the package upgrade to your customers. We will silently cancel the current mandate and replace it with a new mandate which will include your new unique Service User Number (SUN).

However, we are aware that some banks, as a security feature, may send their customers a notification to let them know that a mandate has been cancelled and a new mandate has been created on their account.

Unfortunately as we do not have oversight of the communication provided by the banks, we are unable to provide a definitive list of banks that do this.

Why weren’t my payments collected as expected following my account upgrade?

You may already be aware that payments can only be processed against active Direct Debit mandates.

As part of the account upgrade process, we must cancel the existing mandates and resubmit new instructions to your customers’ banks under your new Service User Number (SUN) shown on your customers’ bank statements. 

Should your payments’ charge dates fall on the same day(s) that the new mandates are still being processed, there’s potential for payment collection dates and payouts to be delayed by a few days.

You may wish to schedule the account upgrade during a period when you are not collecting many payments to avoid payment failures and/or charge dates being pushed forward. If you have more flexibility as to when you need payments processed then that’s great and you need not worry.

Why can’t I reconcile the payments collected from my payers following my account upgrade?

When the account upgrade is completed, new mandates, with new mandate IDs, will be created and linked to your new Service User Number (SUN). This means that when the mandates are cancelled in preparation for their resubmission to your customers’ banks, you will no longer be able to use the old mandate IDs to raise payments for your customers. 

If you are using the dashboard to manage your payments then this section will not apply to you. However, if you are using a partner integration or your own, it is important that you update the mandate IDs recorded in your database as you’ll need to use the new mandate IDs to charge your customers in the future. You will have been alerted of this change via a webhook event. 

N.B. To receive webhooks you will need to have a valid webhook endpoint enabled on your GoCardless account. More details on how to set this up can be found within our developer docs here.