Adding your first customer
Let’s add our first customer and set up a new Direct Debit mandate or Instant Bank Payment.
A customer is a person or company we want to take payments from.
A mandate is an authorisation from a customer to take payments from their bank account - once you have a mandate set up, you can charge the customer with future API calls. (A customer can have multiple mandates, but you’ll almost always only want one.)
An Instant Bank Payment is a one-off payment collected via open banking. It can be combined with a mandate to collect an initial setup fee and a subscription or simply used on its own.
Adding customers using Billing Request Flows
GoCardless provides secure, hosted, mobile-friendly, conversion-optimised payment pages with all the advantages of the hosted payment pages mentioned below but with the added benefits and flexibility of Instant Bank Payments and bank account verification alongside Direct Debit Mandate setup.