Skip to content
← For small businesses

Enter your idea

For small businesses: Business features

Categories

(thinking…)

Invoice Payments - Collect GoCardless "ASAP" instead of on Due Date

It would be really good to have a tick box on the Invoice creation page similar to "GoCardless: Collect ASAP" which would cause the payment to be collected ASAP as opposed to on the Due Date of the invoice.

For customers who already have a mandate set up via GoCardless, using "+0 days" for Repeating Invoices or "Today" for standard invoices as the Due Date resolves the problem in a way - the money is collected ASAP.

But for customers who do not have a mandate set up, things get even more complicated.
We generally set the Due Date of an invoice to +1month to give customers a reasonable time to pay before the invoice is considered overdue, even if in reality we want the payment ASAP. This means that if the customer kindly signs up to pay via GoCardless soon after receiving the invoice, we still have to wait until +1month for the payment to be taken. If they had paid in some other way on the same date, we'd potentially get the payment much faster.

As for the situation where a customer signs up for GoCardless after the Due Date of the invoice, GoCardless support told me that although a DD mandate for future bills would be created, no payment would be taken for the original invoice! I find that hard to believe and I really hope they were wrong, but if that's correct then it means that if we were to set the Due Date to say 7 days or 14 days instead of 1 month after the invoice date, to help reduce the length of time we have to wait for a payment to be taken, the chances of the customer setting up the mandate with GoCardless before the Due Date are significantly reduced.

So, although it won't resolve the potential problem of customers signing up for GoCardless after the Due Date, a "Collect ASAP" tick box would at least help get payments sooner rather than later. Essentially, with that box ticked, Xero's systems would see that a GoCardless signup had been completed and then set the collection date via the GoCardless API to +4 (or +5 days to be safe) as opposed to whatever was on the invoice itself.

9 votes

We're glad you're here

Please sign in to leave feedback
Signed in as (Sign out)
Close
Close

We’ll send you updates on this idea

F R shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
How important is this to you?

We're glad you're here

Please sign in to leave feedback
Signed in as (Sign out)
Close
Close

We're glad you're here

Please sign in to leave feedback
Signed in as (Sign out)
Close
Close
Submitting...
An error occurred while saving the comment
  • Bee Hesketh commented  ·   ·  Report

    Might have to have a look at Sage then. This is really frustrating and wastes so much of our time. Xero shouldn't advertise this integration, it is barely functional.

  • J Prescott commented  ·   ·  Report

    I agree. Never had this problem with Go Cardless's integration with Sage

  • Mark Bevan commented  ·   ·  Report

    Agree. It is a poor integration. At the very least, it should be possible to force though overdue invoices once a mandate has been created without having to change the due date on every one.

    This is possible if you use the GoCardless for Xero integration, rather than the one supplied by Xero, so its definitely a Xero issue.

  • Bee Hesketh commented  ·   ·  Report

    Almost 2 years and we are still waiting for you to fix major issues with the GoCardless integration....?

  • Bee Hesketh commented  ·   ·  Report

    I've had two phone calls with Xero now about this issue. Both agents have acknowledged that there are issues with the setup, and after trying to find workarounds can see that we are unable to use GoCardless effectively via Xero (due to Xero).

    However, they have also told me that it isn't on the Product Team's agenda. So sounds like it is not going to be resolved.

    I would not recommend Xero for any businesses out there who offer subscription services. I will certainly be looking elsewhere.

  • Tim Rutter commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hi we have stopped using the GoCardless integration and moved our repeating invoicing to another service.

    Xero does not even support moving the Direct Debit charge date ahead of the due date, as our current platform supports and where to find any large opperator do this a norma practise.

  • Bee Hesketh commented  ·   ·  Report

    This would be so useful! We want to setup GoCardless automated payments, but we can't for this exact reason. And there is no way to turn off invoice reminders for repeating invoice templates, so we can't simply change the due dates to the same day for direct debit customers.

    Really frustrating because taking payments automatically would save so much time.