Direct debits are a very powerful and convenient way to collect money from your customers. Once a Direct Debit mandate is set up, you are in control of how much is collected from a customer and when.
Why not use a Standing Order? If you have regular payments which are the same each period, then many people use Standing Orders. The disadvantage of them is that
- You don’t know a customer has set one up until the money arrives in the bank account
- If the regular amount changes (because fees increase for example) you are reliant on the customer changing the standing order.
With Direct Debits, you know when the mandate is set up, so even if you bill in arrears, you can wait until the mandate is set up before starting to deliver the service. Then if the fees change you can just change the amount to be collected
Even better, if your customer’s bills change each period, you can use variable collections, so that the right amount is collected each time.
Within Webchise we have a relationship with GoCardess which allows us to generate the collection requests each time money is due from your customers. We set it to either use an individual account for each franchisee if they are to receive the money, or a single account if you use Centralised receipts.
Then, once the contracts are set up with the billing cycles, we automatically generate the invoices and the payment collection instruction and can include any additional charges they may have incurred since the last invoice.
Our systems are also Making Tax Digital compliant too, so everything the franchisee needs is in one place and you have full visibility of that.
If you would like to find out more, please fill out the contact form below.