What is a mandate?
Before you can collect payment by Direct Debit, your customer must issue you with a mandate. A Direct Debit mandate is an authorisation from your customer to collect future payments. This mandate is called a Direct Debit Instruction, or DDI, although it is commonly referred to as a Direct Debit mandate.
The details of each authorisation are standardised:
- All future payments are authorised so you can collect any amount at any time from your customer
- Your customer must be notified of each payment before it's collected. When you request a payment, an email is automatically sent to your customer
- All payments are covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee which protects customers from payments taken in error. For more details on the Direct Debit Guarantee - Read more >
In many cases, your customer will have a specific schedule of payments in mind, such as a fixed subscription, when they authorise a DDI to you. The notification requirements of a DDI and the Direct Debit Guarantee help protect them from any other payments taken in error or fraudulently.
TIP: You may see an error message if you request a mandate from a record which has special characters in the company, or contact name. To resolve this please remove any special characters from the record or contact.
Requesting mandates
In Sage 50 Accounts v24.2 and above, you have the option to generate a generic mandate request link. This is not customer specific and can be used on your website or on general communications to your customers to encourage them to set up Direct Debit with you.
- Click Customers then double-click the required customer.
- Enter your customer's Direct Debit email then click Set up mandate and click Yes.
If the Direct Debit email is already populated, just click Set up the mandate.
- Click Send Direct Debit request, the Direct Debit Manager Status should now be Requested.
- Click Close.
- The customer now receives an email with a link to authorise the Direct Debit mandate. They should click on this link and enter their contact and bank details on the secure page.
If the customer doesn't receive the email, or you need to send it again, in the Customer list, click the required customer then from the toolbar, click Request Mandate and click Send Direct Debit request.
- Once the customer has authorised the mandate, the Direct Debit Manager Status changes to Active.
To refresh the status, on the toolbar click Refresh mandate.
You're now ready to request direct debit payments from your customer.
Mandate status
To refresh the mandate status, click Customers then click Refresh mandate.
Below is what you may see and what the status means.
NOTE: The wording should match the status on GoCardless website.
| <> | No mandate or request exists. |
| Requested | The mandate is created but the customer has not set up the mandate yet. |
| Setup Failed | The customer has failed to set up the mandate. |
| Pending customer approval | The mandate has not yet been signed by the second customer if required. |
| Pending submission | The mandate has not yet been submitted to the customer's bank. |
| Submitted | The mandate has been submitted to the customer's bank but has not been processed yet. |
| Active | The mandate is successfully set up by the customer's bank. |
| Failed | The mandate could not be created. |
| Cancelled | The mandate has been cancelled either by you or the customer. |
| Expired | The mandate has expired. |
If you've a customer you no longer want to request payments from, or the wrong mandate ID is linked to the customer record, you can delink them from GoCardless.
