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Moving from GoCardless ​

If your club already collects membership fees by Direct Debit through GoCardless, the mandates your members signed are the thing you least want to lose. They come across. Your members do not set anything up again, do not re-authorise anything, and do not hear from anybody.

This is one of the two arrival paths you run yourself, because it reads from an account your club already owns.

Who can do this?

Connecting GoCardless and running the import: Club Admin or Treasurer.

Before you start ​

Two things have to be true.

  1. The mandates are on your club's own GoCardless account. Connecting gives us access to read that account, and everything on it comes across. If your old membership system collected on its own account rather than yours, there is nothing here for us to read and your members will need to set up a new Direct Debit — see From another membership platform.
  2. Your members are already in. The import matches each mandate to a member you have, so get your roster in first — by England Athletics roster, from a file, or however you arrived. Email addresses on those records make the matching much better, because that is the first thing it tries.

Connect GoCardless first: choose I have a GoCardless account rather than creating a new one, so you keep the account the mandates are on. The steps are in Connect GoCardless.

What comes across ​

Every Direct Debit mandate on the connected account that still has something left to collect against it, as a payment method on the member it belongs to, with the bank details GoCardless already holds.

A mandate that has been cancelled, has failed, has expired, has been used up or has been blocked is left alone — there is nothing to bring across, and importing it would only give your treasurer a payment method that cannot take money.

Each mandate is matched to a member by email address, then by name:

  • A confident match creates that member's payment method straight away. Nothing more for you to do.
  • Anything less than confident is listed for you to decide, with the GoCardless customer's name and email, the mandate's state, and a suggested member where there is one.

What does not come across ​

  • Past collections. Money already taken through GoCardless stays there as history. It is not turned into memberships, invoices or seasons here — a payment on its own does not say which membership year it was for.
  • Members. A mandate names a GoCardless customer, not a club member. If somebody paying you is not on your roster, add them first and run the import again.
  • Sign-ins. As everywhere else, an account is something you invite somebody to.

Running it ​

  1. Open Settings → GoCardless import. It only appears once GoCardless is connected — before then there is nothing to read.
  2. Choose Import from GoCardless and confirm.
  3. It runs in the background. Give it a few minutes — every mandate means a round trip to GoCardless — then look at the list on the same page.

You can run it again whenever you like. A mandate already brought across is skipped rather than duplicated.

Working the review list ​

Anything that could not be matched confidently is under Mandates to review, oldest first. Two answers on each row:

  • Match to member — choose the person, and their payment method is created from the mandate. The suggested match is filled in for you where there is one; change it if it is wrong.
  • Skip — takes the row off the list. You are asked for a reason, and a skipped mandate is not offered again, so use it for a mandate that genuinely is not one of your members'.

An empty list means every mandate on your account has been matched or skipped.

What your members see ​

Nothing. No email, no notification, no request to re-authorise. Their Direct Debit continues under the mandate they already signed, and the first they will know is a renewal that collects itself.

Each payment method created is recorded in your club's activity log, so months later it is clear where it came from — see Activity log.

If it does not work ​

The GoCardless import page is not in Settings ​

GoCardless is not connected yet, or you are not a Club Admin or Treasurer. See Connect GoCardless.

Everything landed in the review list ​

Almost always because the roster went in without email addresses — an England Athletics import brings none, because England Athletics does not share them. Matching then falls back to names, which is deliberately cautious. Add the email addresses you have and run it again; the rest can be matched by hand.

A member has two payment methods now ​

One from the import and one they set up themselves. Neither is wrong, and your treasurer should leave the one you want future collections taken against — see Payments.

See also ​

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