Adding your first customer

Building your own Direct Debit setup process

Note: When setting up a mandate, your setup process (e.g. a set of payment screens on a screen or a paper form) must comply with Direct Debit scheme rules. To make this easy for you, GoCardless hosts secure and fully compliant payment pages that have been translated into many European languages.

If you’d like to build your own custom payment pages using the Billing Requests API., please contact our sales team who’ll be able to explain the process.

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.

Get started

What's Next?

Webhooks: Getting realtime updates