Direct Debit

What it is

Direct Debit (DD) is one of the payment mechanisms Syndik8 supports for collecting outstanding member charges. It is a variable-amount, members-paying-the-syndicate Bacs flow: a member sets up a mandate once, and from then on whatever the member owes is pulled from their bank account a set number of working days after it became due. The amount is variable, and the timing follows the bill rather than a timetable of its own.

DD differs from card payment in four ways that matter to members and admins:

Pre-debit notice is mandatory. Bacs scheme rules require an advance notice before each collection, and the duty falls on the Bacs service user — here the payment provider, who collect on the syndicate’s behalf. The member is told the amount before it runs; the day comes from the provider’s own notice, because the provider is the party that decides it. A member who wants to stop or reclaim a collection does so through their own bank under the Direct Debit Guarantee, not through Syndik8.
Collections settle days after they’re requested. A DD instructed today does not arrive in the syndicate’s account until two to three working days later. Failures (insufficient funds, mandate cancelled, indemnity claim) come back even later, and an indemnity claim can land long after the collection cleared.
Reversals are a real possibility. The Direct Debit Guarantee gives members the right to claim back any collection through their own bank without having to justify it, and there is no deadline Syndik8 controls after which one can no longer arrive. Indemnity claims are a first-class case in the reversals model.
A collection needs nothing from the member; a card payment does. Both reserve the charges they cover, and the balance screen distinguishes them. A charge a Direct Debit is collecting shows a DD pill and no Pay button, because paying it by hand would take the money twice. A charge held by the member’s own unfinished card payment keeps its Pay button, because nobody has taken that money and paying again is what settles it. See Member balance.

Who can use it

Member: sets up their own mandate, and sees an incoming collection on their balance screen — the amount, and that it is on its way, but no date. See Advance notice for why there is no day to show.
Admin (including treasurer): set the syndicate’s card-payment delay, collect on demand, see every member’s mandate status, monitor collection history. The advance-notice lead time is not a syndicate setting: the legal Bacs notice is issued by the payment provider, who holds the Bacs service user number and so carries the scheme’s notice duty. The syndicate is the provider’s facilities-management client and has no scheme role of its own, and Syndik8 shows no lead time of its own either — the day a collection goes is the provider’s to choose, and it does not say which day it chose.
Other members: do not see one another’s mandates or collections.

Where to find it

Members reach their Direct Debit from a card on their My Balance screen, which appears whenever the syndicate accepts Direct Debit. With no mandate yet it reads Set up Direct Debit and offers Set it up; while the bank is verifying a new one it says so and offers nothing to press; once the mandate is live it reads Direct Debit active, names the bank account being debited, and carries a Manage action that opens the same setup screen, where the mandate can be cancelled. An admin can also send a member straight to setup: the Prompt to set up Direct Debit action delivers a notification whose deep-link opens it.
Admins (treasurer counts as admin) open the Direct Debit row on the admin Payments hub, where the card-payment delay, the Collect now action and the register of member mandates live.
Collections a member has had are listed on their Payment history, reached from the receipt icon on My Balance, alongside their card payments. Each row names the outcome and, where a collection did not succeed, says what happened and whether any money moved. A tap on a Direct Debit failed notification opens it. See Payment history.

The card only shows when the syndicate’s payment account is active and the active provider supports Direct Debit. On a provider that does not support it, the card and the rest of the flow do not appear.

Concepts

Mandate

A mandate is the standing instruction the member gives their bank to permit collections from a specified payee. One row per provider mandate reference; a member can have several mandates over time (e.g. cancelled and re-set-up), but only one is active at a time per syndicate.

Status	Meaning
`pending`	Mandate created on the provider; awaiting member signature.
`active`	Member has signed; ready for collection.
`cancelled`	The mandate was cancelled — by the member in the app, by an admin, or by the member directly with their bank.
`rejected`	Bank rejected the mandate (e.g. AUDDIS: invalid account details).

Mandates are scheme-tagged (bacs, sepa, ach). Today only bacs is in production; the others are reserved for future regions.

Advance notice

An advance notice is the pre-debit warning the member receives before each DD collection. The legal Bacs advance-notice email is sent by the payment provider, who hold the Bacs service user number and so carry the scheme’s notice obligation. Syndik8 adds an in-app “debit incoming” notification, with a push where the member has opted in, naming the same amount and saying the money will leave over the next few working days — not a specific day, which only the provider knows. On the bank statement the collection appears as “Stripe”, so tell members to expect that name rather than the syndicate’s.

Syndik8’s own notice tells the member:

The amount that will be collected.
That it will leave their account over the next few working days.

It does not name a day, and that is deliberate. The payment provider decides when a Bacs collection actually goes, does not tell Syndik8 what it chose, and describes its own estimate as not guaranteed — so a date in the app would be a prediction about somebody else’s behaviour, shown to a member as a fact about their own bank account. The provider’s advance-notice email is where a date comes from.

Tapping the in-app notice opens the member’s balance screen, where the charges the collection is taking are listed as being on their way out.

The notice is raised automatically the moment a collection reaches the payment provider, so it only appears once a debit is genuinely on its way; members with no outstanding balance to debit on a given run get no phantom notice. There is no in-app way to stop a collection once it has been submitted — see the Direct Debit Guarantee below, which is a stronger remedy than one Syndik8 could offer.

Collection (settlement)

Instructing the provider to collect creates a settlement record with mechanism Direct Debit and lifecycle:

Status	Meaning
Scheduled	The collection has been sent to the payment provider and is awaiting Bacs submission. This is also what shields it from the stale-claim sweep, so a collection that may already be on its way is never released and re-collected.
Submitted	Bacs file submitted to the bank.
Captured	Bank reports successful collection (typically T+2 working days).
Confirmed	Bank has confirmed the collection (Direct Debit only).
Settled	Funds landed in the syndicate account.
Declined	Bank rejected the collection (e.g. insufficient funds, mandate cancelled).
Cancelled	Collection was cancelled before submission.
Reversed	A later reversal (indemnity claim, AUDDIS) overturned a previously captured collection.

When the settlement reaches captured, the underlying transactions are marked settled. A subsequent reversal re-opens those transactions for re-collection only when it is recorded as rebill; recorded as forgive it leaves them settled, and recorded as a correction it leaves them settled at a corrected figure.

Refunding a collection

An admin can send a captured collection back to the member from inside the app — in whole or in part — the same way as any other payment. See Refund or correct a payment.

Bacs makes this slower than a card refund. The provider accepts the instruction immediately, but the money takes several working days to reach the member’s bank, and nobody’s balance moves until it lands. Until then the refund sits under On its way back on the Reversals screen, holding its amount against what remains refundable on that collection. That is deliberate: an admin who could not see a refund in progress would raise a second one for the same money.

Cancelling a mandate

A member can cancel their own mandate from the mandate setup screen, reached from Manage on the Direct Debit card on their My Balance screen. The screen sends the cancellation to the payment provider, which forwards it to the member’s bank; the local mandate flips to cancelled once the provider confirms it, so the screen header reflects the new state without any further action. An admin’s members list picks the change up the next time it is opened.

A cancellation is forward-looking only: it stops future collections but does not undo collections that have already captured. To recover money from a past collection the member claims it back through their own bank under the Direct Debit Guarantee; the clawback then arrives in Syndik8 as a reversal on that collection.

Once cancelled, a new mandate can be set up from scratch on the same screen. The cancelled row is preserved in history so admins can see when collection stopped against it.

Cancelling at the bank instead

A member may also cancel a Direct Debit directly with their bank, which is their right under the Direct Debit Guarantee and needs no notice to anyone. Syndik8 hears about that from the payment provider and marks the mandate cancelled on its own, without the member doing anything in the app.

When that happens both the member and the syndicate’s admins are notified, because it changes who pays how:

the member is told nothing more will be collected, that anything owed stays owed, and that they can set up a new Direct Debit or pay another way;
the admins are told a member has come off Direct Debit, so they know why the collection run has stopped including them.

The member then falls back into the ordinary balance-due chasing that non-Direct-Debit members get. The same applies if the bank refuses a new mandate during the few working days it takes to activate: the mandate is recorded rejected rather than cancelled, and the member is asked to set one up again.

When a member starts mandate setup, the payment provider emails them a consent link. If that email is missed, deleted, or filtered into spam, the member should start Direct Debit setup again from the mandate setup screen, which sends a fresh consent link from the payment provider.

Admins can trigger this via the Prompt to set up Direct Debit action on the member’s detail screen (see below). When that prompt fires against a member with a pending mandate, Syndik8 sends the member an in-app notification and email prompting them to start setup again.

When collection happens (admin)

Direct Debit collects what is due, a set number of working days after it became due. There is no collection timetable of its own to keep in step with billing: the Billing screen decides when a charge is demanded, and collection follows it.

The one setting is the card-payment delay, on the Direct Debit screen:

Counted in working days from the day the charge became due, so weekends are skipped. Bank holidays are deliberately not modelled: a delay landing on one collects that morning like any other weekday.
The minimum is one working day and the default is three. Zero is not offered and is refused server-side, so a member who has just been billed always has at least one working day to settle by card first.
The collection is submitted that morning.

A daily background runner does the work. It fires a collection for each member who has both an active mandate and charges whose delay has elapsed, and skips members with no outstanding balance, since there is nothing to debit.

Cash calls wait for their own date. A cash call charge carries a due date fixed when the call was issued, and no collection touches it before that date. The carve-out sits in the collection itself, so it holds for the daily runner, for Collect now, and for the nightly run that follows a billing-period close. It applies on both sides of the sum: an undue cash call neither makes a member eligible for a collection on its own, nor adds to the amount of a collection that some other charge has already triggered. Closing the billing period does not bring the date forward either — the close marks the period’s other charges due and steps over cash-call charges entirely. On its due date the charge becomes ordinary and is collected like any other due balance.

Stopping collection. There is no syndicate-wide pause, because collection is not on a cadence of its own. To stop money moving, stop charges becoming due: stay on at close and don’t close the period, and turn off automatic monthly billing. To stop collecting from one member, cancel their mandate.

Collect now. The Direct Debit screen also carries a Collect now button, the manual override for a treasurer who wants the money moving before the delay has elapsed. Tapping it shows a per-member preview (name, number of charges, total amount) and a reminder that collection follows the usual Bacs timeline once dispatched. Confirming fires the collections immediately. Collect now is admin-only and goes through the same eligibility checks as the daily runner (active mandate, outstanding balance, and no unresolved collection of their own).

One collection per member at a time. A member can have only one Direct Debit collection outstanding at once. Until the one already submitted resolves — the money arrives, the bank returns it, or the collection is found never to have gone — nothing further can be taken from them, and a second attempt is refused in full rather than trimmed to the charges that are free.

That is why a preview can name a member it is not going to collect from. Both the Collect now preview and the Make balances due preview list such a member under their own heading, with their balance and the reason, instead of leaving them out silently: a short list with no explanation reads as “nobody else owes anything”. The confirmation afterwards says both figures — how many collections were submitted, and how many members were left out.

Nothing is lost by waiting. Their balance stays owed and is picked up by the next run once the earlier collection resolves, so there is normally nothing for an admin to do. A collection that stays unresolved for longer than a few working days is chased automatically against the payment provider, and if it turns out never to have reached the bank it is released and the charges become collectable again. To take the money outside Direct Debit in the meantime, record an external payment against the member’s balance.

Admin nudges to set up Direct Debit

If a member hasn’t set up DD yet, an admin can nudge them from the members list. Opening the member’s detail screen and tapping Prompt to set up Direct Debit sends them an in-app notification and an email asking them to set up (or finish setting up) their mandate; the notification deep-links to the mandate setup screen.

Which members need nudging is shown two ways. In the members list, a member with no working mandate carries a small amber payment icon in their row; the icon’s tooltip reads “Direct Debit not set up”, and the Needs attention filter narrows the list to just those members. Opening a member shows the same thing in words under Payments — “Direct Debit active” or “Direct Debit not set up” — with the prompt button offered only in the second case. Both readings need a live connection: mandates are held per member, so the app fetches them when the screen opens rather than from the offline copy. When that fetch can’t complete, the member’s line reads “Direct Debit status unavailable” and no icon appears, rather than reporting a member as unset when nobody has actually checked.

The copy and tone of the nudge are decided server-side from the member’s current mandate state:

No mandate at all: the nudge invites the member to start setup from scratch.
Pending mandate (signature still outstanding at the bank): the nudge invites the member to start setup again, which issues a fresh consent link from the payment provider.
Active mandate: the action does nothing and the admin sees a “Direct Debit is already active” message, because nudging a member who is already set up would be confusing for them.

Members can mute the nudge from their notification preferences if they have decided not to use Direct Debit and don’t want repeat reminders. There is no cool-down on the admin side; an admin can send the prompt more than once if the member needs another reminder.

Behaviour rules

Variable amounts are the default. The collection amount is whatever the member has outstanding when the collection is raised, not a fixed monthly figure. This matches the use-case (variable hours flown, variable expenses) but means each notice must reflect the actual amount.
A member’s remedy is at their own bank, and it is the stronger one. Syndik8 offers no button to dispute or suppress a collection, deliberately. Under the Direct Debit Guarantee the member’s own bank refunds a collection immediately, in full, without the member having to justify it — a claim no in-app objection could match, and one Syndik8 has no standing in. The charges themselves do not disappear when a collection is reclaimed; they return to the member’s balance.
Syndik8 never states a collection day. It has no way to know one: the payment provider chooses when the collection goes and does not report the choice. What the app records and shows is that a collection is under way and what it is taking, which is the same on the notice and on the balance screen because both read the same record.
Mandate cancellations are not retroactive. A cancellation prevents future collections. Past collections on the now-cancelled mandate are not affected; a member wanting one of those back claims it through their bank under the Direct Debit Guarantee.
A cash call is never collected before its due date. Direct Debit has always worked this way, and the member’s balance screen now says the same thing: until the date arrives the charge sits outside the balance figure, outside the Outstanding rows and outside Pay All, in a Cash calls not due yet card where the member can settle it early by card if they choose. An admin can instead move the date itself: correcting an issued call’s due date restamps every one of its charges, so the collection runs on the corrected date. That correction is refused while a collection is already holding one of the call’s charges, because the member has an advance notice out naming the day the money will leave. See Cash calls and Correct a cash call’s due date.
Failed collections do not auto-retry. A declined settlement leaves the underlying transactions unpaid; the next billing cycle picks them up in a fresh collection, with its own advance notice.
A collection request that never reached the bank is released, and both sides are told. Occasionally a collection is submitted to the payment provider and the reply is lost, so Syndik8 cannot tell whether a debit is on its way. Such a collection is never assumed either way: Syndik8 asks the provider directly, and only when the provider confirms it holds no collection that is this one’s — either nothing at all, or only collections that have already finished — are the charges freed. Because no money left the member’s account and no advance notice was ever issued, the member is told explicitly that the request did not reach their bank — not merely that a collection failed — so nobody rings a bank about a debit that was never requested. The syndicate’s admins are told at the same time, since the charges they were expecting to be paid become outstanding again.
The Direct Debit Guarantee is honoured. Members can claim back any DD collection through their own bank without having to justify it, and there is no deadline Syndik8 controls after which one can no longer arrive. The clawback arrives as a reversal on that collection and is processed exactly like any other reversal. Where it re-bills the charges, the member’s notification names the sum and the collection date and says the amount is owed again.