Operate Direct Debit

This page is the operational checklist: enablement, statuses, recovery, collections, and testing. For the product journey, start at Direct Debit.

Read first:

• How Direct Debit works — mandate versus collection
• Start from a customer — setup only
• Start from an invoice and checkout — charge surfaces
• Customer portal — view, cancel, or change bank
• Emails and notices — what customers receive

Understand each party's role

RevKeen and London & Zurich do not replace your relationship with your customer. Payment-specific questions, disputes about goods or services, and requests to change a payment schedule remain your responsibility.

Enable Direct Debit

Before you send a live mandate request:

1. Complete Direct Debit onboarding in Settings > Payments > Direct Debit.
2. Confirm your London & Zurich provisioning and settlement account checks are complete.
3. Configure the merchant name, logo, customer-support details, bank statement name, and advance-notice period shown to customers.
4. Complete the sandbox checks shown by RevKeen.
5. Wait for Direct Debit to show as enabled for your merchant account.

Direct Debit is enabled per merchant. Disabling it stops new Direct Debit setup and collection activity; it does not silently move customers to card payments.

Which purchases can use Direct Debit

Direct Debit is offered for one-off purchases and for prices billed weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, every six months or yearly.

Direct Debit is not offered when any recurring price in the purchase bills daily (including "every 7 days" set up as a daily price — use a weekly price instead). The customer sees your other payment methods. If Direct Debit is the only method on that checkout link or invoice, the customer is told no payment method is available; RevKeen does not switch them to card.

At checkout, Direct Debit is also not offered yet for:

• a free trial combined with an amount due today (such as a joining fee);
• a subscription whose first period is prorated or starts on a later billing day;
• a metered (usage-based) product.

These are hidden before the customer sets up a mandate, the same way as daily billing, so nobody sets up a mandate that cannot be used for the purchase.

A price with a quantity (for example seats) can be bought by Direct Debit. The subscription keeps the quantity the customer chose.

Free trials and £0 first payments

A subscription with a free trial, or one whose first payment is £0 (for example because a discount covers the first period), can be bought by Direct Debit. At checkout the customer sets up the mandate and nothing is collected: RevKeen never submits a £0 collection.

• The subscription starts straight away: Trialing during a free trial, or Active when the first period is £0.
• After a free trial, the first payment is taken on the day the trial ends. The customer gets the advance notice first, at least your advance-notice period before that date. If the notice cannot reach them in time, the payment moves to the next date that allows it. After a £0 first period, the next payment is collected like any other renewal.
• A trialing subscription becomes Active when that first payment succeeds.
• If the mandate is not active by the end of the trial (for example it was cancelled or rejected), nothing is collected. The customer is sent a new mandate request and a link to pay another way, and the subscription is marked Incomplete.

A free trial combined with an amount due today (such as a joining fee) cannot be paid by Direct Debit yet. Direct Debit is not offered for that purchase at checkout, so offer another payment method for that price.

Create and send a mandate request

Send from the customer record or from an invoice. Customer-record send is setup only. Invoice and checkout collect only after the mandate is Active and notice is given.

Opening a valid request establishes a short-lived, secure, HttpOnly setup cookie. RevKeen does not add a persistent recognition cookie for this journey. Completing, abandoning, or selecting This isn't me clears the active setup cookie; bank details and consent are never stored in browser storage.

Track mandate statuses

Provider or Bacs reason codes may appear in the operator detail for support. Do not send raw codes to customers; use the explanation and recovery action shown by RevKeen.

Send invitations, reminders, and confirmations

Templates, subjects, and when each message sends: Emails and notices.

An instruction received message is not an active mandate confirmation. Do not copy the unique secure link into analytics metadata, email-event properties, or support notes.

Give advance notice

The approved period is three working days. Combined versus separate letters: How Direct Debit works.

Handle failed, cancelled, and multiple-signatory mandates

Multiple signatories are required

The online journey is for accounts where the payer is the account holder and the only person required to authorise the Direct Debit. If another person must also sign, the customer must stop the online journey and contact you. Use the alternative process approved for your London & Zurich arrangement.

Bank details are rejected

Ask the customer to check the account-holder name, sort code, and account number in the secure form. Do not ask them to email bank details or paste them into chat. If the account is not eligible for electronic Direct Debit, offer the merchant-assisted alternative shown by RevKeen.

The provider is temporarily unavailable

Do not ask the customer to keep submitting. Preserve safe contact and address details, ask them to try again later, and monitor RevKeen for the provider recovery. Never store raw bank details in browser or support tooling.

The customer needs to pay another way

Card fallback is a separate, customer-initiated action. Do not silently charge a backup card because a mandate is awaiting activation or because a collection outcome is not yet known.

To move a subscription between card and Direct Debit, send the customer a switch link from the subscription page: Send switch-to-card link on the Direct Debit panel, or Send switch-to-Direct-Debit link on a card subscription. The customer completes the switch in the portal — choosing the card and agreeing to future payments, or setting up the mandate. You never change how a customer pays without them. See Pay by card instead.

Setting a new default card in the portal only changes card subscriptions. A subscription paid by Direct Debit keeps its Direct Debit until the customer switches it.

Update a customer address

An address edited during mandate signup is used for that mandate submission. Updating the canonical Customer address requires the customer's explicit confirmation. RevKeen records that action so the change can be audited.

If the customer does not confirm the profile update, retain the existing canonical Customer address and keep the mandate-specific address with the mandate evidence according to your retention policy.

Support and troubleshoot customers

Use the Dashboard to check:

• Request delivery, open, start, submit, and completion states
• Link expiry or cancellation
• The latest canonical mandate status and status reason
• Confirmation-email delivery
• Mandate and Guarantee documents available to authorised staff
• Whether a retry, replacement mandate, or merchant-assisted route is appropriate

Do not ask for a full account number by email, chat, or telephone. Direct customers back to the secure journey. Escalate suspected security or technical issues to RevKeen Support without including the secure mandate link or bank details.

Send customers to Direct Debit help for a plain-language explanation of the process.

Collect after the mandate is Active

Do not schedule a collection while the mandate is Awaiting setup, Submitted, Failed, Suspended, Cancelled, or an expired request. Active is the collectable status.

Before each collection:

1. Confirm the mandate is Active in the dashboard.
2. Give advance notice of amount and date for the period configured on your arrangement.
3. Submit the collection from the invoice, subscription, or collection action RevKeen shows.
4. Monitor collection.scheduled, collection.notice_sent, collection.succeeded, and collection.failed if you subscribe to webhooks.

Card fallback is a separate, customer-initiated action. Do not silently charge a backup card because a collection outcome is unknown.

Refunds

Direct Debit payments can't be refunded through RevKeen yet. The refund action, the API (POST /v2/refunds answers dd_refund_not_supported) and the Assistant all decline a Direct Debit payment rather than send it to your card processor. Refund the customer outside RevKeen, for example by bank transfer. Refunding to the customer's wallet still works.

Direct Debit payments can't be voided either. To stop a collection that hasn't been taken yet, cancel or pause the subscription, or void the invoice.

Indemnity claims

If a customer or their bank raises a Direct Debit indemnity claim, RevKeen records collection.indemnity_claimed. Ordinary indemnity claims remain between you, the customer, and London & Zurich / Bacs. Use the dashboard reason and recovery action. Do not tell the customer a raw Bacs code.

Payments taken back after success

A Direct Debit collection can be taken back after it was reported as successful, either because the payer's bank returns it (an unpaid return) or because the payer raises an indemnity claim. When that happens, RevKeen:

• records a dispute against the original payment and, for an indemnity claim, sends the collection.indemnity_claimed webhook event. No public webhook is sent for an unpaid return after success: watch for the dashboard dispute record, the Inbox alert, and the reopened invoice;
• reopens the invoice, so it shows as unpaid again;
• moves an active subscription to past due (it is not cancelled);
• emails the customer a link to pay the invoice another way.

If the reopened invoice is still unpaid after your maximum dunning days, the subscription becomes unpaid or cancelled, as your dunning settings say. See Dunning.

For an unpaid return you also get an alert in your Inbox. Indemnity claims keep their own alert with a response deadline.

When a new subscription's first payment fails

If the first Direct Debit payment of a subscription bought through checkout fails for good, and your setting is to ask the customer to pay by card, the customer gets a payment request and a payment window. By default the window is 7 days. You can set it from 1 to 30 days in the Direct Debit settings, under Days to pay after a failed first payment.

• Paid within the window: the subscription starts and the order is completed.
• Not paid in time: the subscription expires and nothing is fulfilled.
• Paid after the window ended: the payment is kept on the invoice, but the subscription does not start. You get an Inbox alert so you can refund the customer or set the subscription up yourself.

Checkout and portal

• Hosted checkout can offer Direct Debit when the rail is enabled. See Start from checkout.
• The customer portal lists mandates, supports cancel, runs change-of-bank with OTP, and lets a customer move a subscription to a saved card. Do not collect on a cancelled or replaced mandate.

Test before going live

Verify the complete journey on a sandbox merchant, including:

• A successful request through Submitted and Active
• Invalid bank details and an unsupported bank account
• Multiple-signatory exit
• Expired and cancelled links
• Wrong-customer handling
• Duplicate submission and refresh
• Confirmation-email failure
• Provider and address-search unavailability
• United Kingdom, Jersey, Guernsey, and Isle of Man address entry
• Mobile, keyboard, and screen-reader operation

Confirm that analytics report journey stages without customer, address, or bank-field contents.

Related

• Smart Payment -- Direct Debit first, with a consent-gated card fallback
• Direct Debit overview
• Emails and notices
• Customer portal
• Customer Direct Debit help
• Customers
• Customer Portal
• Data handling

Recovery and customer identity

Use the dashboard's recovery action for the reported collection/mandate state. For an ARUDD instruction-cancelled result (code 3), request fresh customer authorisation through the secure recovery journey; do not silently retry the cancelled instruction. Code meanings depend on the report type, so do not apply an ARUDD interpretation to an ADDACS report.

A backup card is a separate customer-authorised fallback, not permission to charge while a collection outcome is unknown. Preserve identity verification and the customer's explicit choice. A changed bank requires the portal OTP sequence and a replacement mandate; wait for its active status before scheduling collection.

Keep pending collection confirmations distinct from settled receipts. Send the required notices through the supported notice channel; recording an SMS consent flag does not establish support for Direct Debit notices by SMS. Review emails and notices and Portal API step-up.

API reference for this workflow

Direct Debit

Parameters, response schemas, and examples for direct debit.

Mandates

Parameters, response schemas, and examples for mandates.

Owner: david · Reviewed 1 Oct 2026 · Next review 29 Dec 2026