Yes, you need your own GoCardless account. We never touch your money, payments from your members will be taken by GoCardless and paid out directly into your bank account.

As a rule we don't take any fees on transactions. Our model is a fixed fee payment for a service with bands based around usage. We think this is simpler and generally a better reflection of our costs to provide the service. (This approach isn't right for all, particularly very low volume users and we may bring out new fee based services in the future.)

Payment plans are the ways of paying for your service (typically membership). For example you may offer three ways to pay: Credit Card, one off Direct Debit, 12 monthly instalments. In your Sheep settings you would define three payment plans. A payment plan doesn't know about an amount. You could, as an extreme example, use the 12 monthly instalments payment plan to pay for a £12 membership or a £1200 membership.

When a membership has a payment plan attached the system will "unpack" the payments.

The "unpacking" process

1) Check that an active mandate exists for the payer

2) Calculate the individual payments

3) Calculate the start date of the first payment

4) Calculate the dates of the remaining payments

5) Generate 'future' payment records

A future payment (also known as a scheduled payment) is a payment from a payment plan which Sheep will request in the future.

The total amount may not divide equally, when that happens the first payment will be slightly higher or lower than the remaining payments.

If a payment other than the first is different it implies that an intervention has taken place and you should check the audit log.

When the first payment will be taken is calculated by the type of purchase, modifications added by the payment plan (such as a delayed first payment) and the status of the member mandate.

However, if the payment is via Direct Debit then the payment date is actually the date when payment will be requested from GoCardless. In normal circumstances the member will have the money taken a couple of days later and you'll receive the payout a few more days after that. The vagueness here is deliberate; weekends, bank holidays and insufficient funds may all delay the payment flow.

When communicating with members we recommend language such as "your payment will be taken on or about the 3rd of each month".

When a payment is confirmed by GoCardless the payment date is updated to the actual date.

This is quite common when the scheduled date falls at the end of the month. (see the proceeding question)

Payment A - Scheduled July 29th

Payment B - Scheduled August 29th

Payment A will probably be collected in early August when collected the date will change to reflect reality:

Payment A - Collected August 3rd

Payment B - Scheduled August 29th

The example may now match what you are seeing with two payments in the same month. However, Payment B will typically have the same delay as Payment A.

Payment A - Collected August 3rd

Payment B - Collected September 4th

The payments now look normal, roughly one month apart.

If your example does not match this check for interventions using the audit log.

No, it isn't a problem. The system has safeguards in place so that only one payment can be requested. Sheep will use the first mandate returned to take the payment. You should consider this non-deterministic (random) so payments could, in theory, be taken from different mandates over time. The self-service area allows users to see which mandates they have in place and to cancel or set a new mandate.

GoCardless has an auto-retry failed payments but you can also retry failed payments manually. Find the person, open the transactions tab and scroll down to the GoCardless partner payment list. Any payments which can be retried will show a retry button.

Sometime a payment can't be retried e.g. the mandate has been cancelled. When this has happened in error or the member has created a 2nd GoCardless account you will need to delete the payment and re-create it. (Payments can't be moved between GoCardless accounts even if you know they are the same person.)

Process for 'moving' a payment by deleting and recreating.

The transaction panel shows payments that are recorded in Sheep and when connected payment records are available in GoCardless and Stripe. These third-party payment lists are pulled in real-time directly from those systems and will correspond to what you would see if you logged in and filtered down to the contact.

If a transaction from a third party has been matched to a payment in Sheep that connection will be shown. Where that has happened you will see "In Sheep: No". This is usually because:

(Deleting a payment record in Sheep won't stop a payment that has already been requested. (There is a small window where GoCardless will allow you to cancel the payment.))

This list is not complete but will hopefully highlight the common reasons a payment has not been taken.

Sheep tries to automatically link payments to the things they refer to. The system uses the amount, currency, date and type. When this happens the payment is marked as "payment_reconciled" and the "reference" field is set to thing being purchased.

This process is not 100% and can be thrown by similar payments and missing data. See the next question for how to fix manually.

Note sometimes all that is required is clicking unreconcile as this will trigger a fresh attempt to link the payment.

Please note that simply cancelling or deleting a membership plan will not automatically remove any future or pending payments. These must be removed by following the steps below.

Before proceeding, it's important to understand the difference between cancelling and deleting a membership plan:

If the membership plan has been paid via direct debit, or has any future payments you must first remove these payments before cancelling or deleting a membership plan. To do this, go to the contact record for the member in question and go to the Membership Plans tab. From there, find the card with membership plan you wish to remove future payments for and click on the Delete future payments button.

Once the future payments have been removed, you can safely cancel or delete the membership plan.

To cancel a plan, go to the contact record for the member in question and go to the Membership Plans tab. From there, find the card with membership plan to cancel and click on the Cancel button in the card.

This will cancel the membership plan and the card will have an orange border around it to show that the plan is now cancelled.

To delete a plan, you will first need to cancel the membership plan following the steps above. With the membership plan cancelled, a Delete button will now be visible in the options. Click on this to immediately delete the plan.

Please note that deleting membership plans cannot be undone, so we recommend only cancelling the plan unless there is an explicit reason for deleting it.

from GoCardless

1) A customer cannot change their bank account details themselves. If they want to change the bank account associated with the mandate. You have to cancel the existing mandate and invite them to sign up for a new one. Or you can create it yourself if you have the phone and paper mandate enabled for you
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2) If the bank account is closed or any such updates happen within the bank, then the mandate will be cancelled by the bank automatically at the time of payment collection via GoCardless.
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3) If the customer signs up for a new mandate under a new customer record, then you have to cancel the existing subscription and create a new one for the new active mandate.

We, therefore, recommend that the member creates a new mandate with their new bank detail within the App. (Account > Payments > Mandates). Once a new mandate has been submitted the unwanted mandate can be cancelled.

Direct Debit payments managed by sheepCRM will automatically move to the new mandate but 👇