Build a client to create mandates offline

Billing Request Actions

Whenever you create a Billing Request, it will have a list of actions that require completion before it’s possible to fulfil the request.

The possible actions are:

• choose_currency, have the payer choose from a list of supported currencies

• collect_customer_details, collect customer details required for the schemes

• collect_bank_account, create the bank account for the mandate/payment

• confirm_payer_details, confirm customer and bank account details provided by the payer

Once all required actions have been completed, the Billing Request will become ready_to_fulfil, and an integrator can use the fulfil action to create all associated resources.

Which actions should I implement?

When creating a Billing Request, the response will show you which actions you need to implement to complete it. We will also go through the actions you need to implement in the following steps.

The actions presented on a Billing Request are unordered, but each action may have dependencies, or have other actions depending on it.

These are specified in the fields completes_actions and requires_actions.

Taking collect_customer_details as an example:

Action status is either pending or completed.

requires_actions: Actions can only be executed if the actions listed in requires_action have been completed- in this example, we can't complete collect_customer_details until we've chosen the currency.

completes_actions: Actions can complete other actions, which can help streamline checkout flows. In this example, collect_customer_details does not complete any other action as a side effect.

For offline mandates, we suggest building the flow that process the actions in the order of:

1. collect_customer_details, requires the choose_currency action to be completed but this will be completed automatically when creating the ACH mandate via the Billing Request create API

2. collect_bank_account, collect the customer's bank account details

3. confirm_payer_details, as a scheme compliance rule it is required to crosscheck the details entered and confirm them

Create a Billing Request that specifies the type of mandate you wish to create via the mandate_request field. In this example, we are specifying the scheme as ACH which will default the currency to USD.

For ACH specific mandates, you can provide the authorisation_source field to create an offline mandate. The authorisation_source field specifies the way in which the payer gave authorisation to the merchant. This is sometimes referred to as SEC code. This field takes values of either telephone, paper or web.

Use the Create a Billing Request endpoint:

You’ll receive a full Billing Request resource back.

It will look like this, some detail omitted:

This completes the choose_currency action, and we can now continue with completing the rest of the Billing Request actions to set up this mandate.

Action: collect_customer_details 

Billing Requests aim to create billing resources against a customer, either a mandate (Direct Debit, PayTo or VRPs), an Instant Bank Payment, or both.

Payment schemes vary in what customer details you are required to collect. The collect_customer_details action is about collecting all the details required by either the mandate or the payment scheme, to ensure we meet regulatory needs.

As an example, we can created a Billing Request for ACH scheme:

This returns a Billing Request that looks like this:

Note that:

• There is a collect_customer_details action, which is pending

• A new customer has been created for us, as the Billing Request wasn’t attached to an existing customer

• The customer and customer_billing_detail resources are presented back to us, and they have no filled fields

The collect_customer_details action is designed to help us collect the required information from our customers.

Taking a closer look at the action:

The collect_customer_details.incomplete_fields object tells us what fields we need to collect, for both resources. Which fields are required changes depending on the schemes of the mandate (or payment).

We can complete this action by POST’ing to the Collect customer details for the billing request endpoint.

Note that:

• For online mandates with "authorisation_source": "web", you will need to provide payer's ip_address as a result of their completion of a mandate setup flow in their browser.

• For paper and telephone mandates, you will still need to provide an ip_address in the customer_billing_detail, however, this can just be a dummy ip_address (e.g. 192.0.0.0).

As with all action endpoints, the response is the Billing Request. What we get back is:

Note that:

• The collect_customer_details action is now completed, meaning we can move on to other actions

• As a result of us collecting the details, our customer and customer_billing_detail has been populated with the details we collected

Most integrators will collect these details via web forms, filled by their payers. Integrators are expected to build forms that can collect all possible customer and customer_billing_detail fields (see the Collect customer details schema) but only display the inputs required, as per incomplete_fields.

Depending on the scheme, we might need to collect bank account details before fulfilling the Billing Request. An example is a Direct Debit mandate, where we need to capture the payer’s bank in order to create Direct Debit payments against them.

As an example, we created a Billing Request for ACH scheme:

This returns a Billing Request that looks like this:

Note that:

• There is a collect_bank_account action that is pending

• We have no links.customer_bank_account, confirming no bank account is attached

We can complete this action by POST’ing to the Collect bank account for the billing request endpoint:

As with all action endpoints, the response is the Billing Request. What we get back is:

Note that:

• The collect_bank_account action is now completed, meaning we can move on to other actions

• As a result of us collecting the bank account, we have created a customer_bank_account resource and you can see the links.customer_bank_account ID has been set

As part of scheme compliance, we need to ensure the payer was presented with a confirmation screen before fulfilling the Billing Request. All mandate requests will require this action.

As an example, we created a Billing Request for ACH scheme:

This returns a Billing Request that looks like this:

Note that:

• There is a confirm_payer_details action that is pending

• The action is required- all mandate requests will require this

• The action requires collect_customer_details and collect_bank_account, as we can only show the confirmation page once these actions are completed.

We can complete this action by POST’ing to the confirm payer details endpoint:

As with all action endpoints, the response is the Billing Request. What we get back is:

Note that:

• The confirm_payer_details action is now completed, and the billing request is in ready_to_fulfil state.

We can now move on to fulfilling this Billing Request.

Once the billing request is in ready_to_fulfil state we can complete setting up this mandate by POST'ing to the billing request fulfil endpoint.

As with all action endpoints, the response is the Billing Request. What we get back is:

Done!

The mandate has now been created and is ready to create payments against. The Billing Request is fulfilled, and cannot be modified.