Customer Subscriptions Flow
How customer subscriptions work when GoCardless is available, including mandate requirements, subscription creation, and cancellation.
The subscriptions tab only becomes useful once the business has GoCardless connected and the customer already has an active Direct Debit mandate. Until then, the tab acts more like a setup checkpoint than a subscription manager.
When the Tab Becomes Available
- GoCardless must be available for the business: If the business cannot use GoCardless, the subscriptions tab does not appear.
- The customer needs an active mandate: Without that, the tab shows the Direct Debit setup route instead of a subscription list.
Creating a Subscription
- Amount (£): The recurring payment amount. Work Planner will not let you create the subscription with a zero or invalid amount.
- Frequency: Choose weekly, monthly, or yearly.
- Day of month (1–28): This appears for monthly and yearly subscriptions so the collection day stays safe across shorter months.
- What Work Planner creates: The app sends the subscription to GoCardless and then stores the returned subscription details back on the customer.
Reading the Subscription List
- Amount: Shows the recurring collection amount.
- Interval summary: Tells you how often the payment runs and, where relevant, which day of the month it uses.
- Status badge: Lets you see whether the subscription is active, cancelled, finished, or paused.
Cancelling a Subscription
- Cancel button: Available on active or paused subscriptions.
- What it means: Future payments stop. Work Planner treats this as a serious action and asks for confirmation first.
If No Mandate Exists Yet
Instead of a subscription list, the customer sees the Direct Debit setup route. That is Work Planner telling you the customer still needs the GoCardless mandate before recurring payments can start.
Linking a Direct Debit They Already Have
If the customer has already set up a Direct Debit with your GoCardless account some other way, such as through the sign-up link on your website, click Link existing Direct Debit instead of sending a new link. You need permission to change customers.
- Choosing it: the popup lists your GoCardless account's Direct Debits that can still collect payments, with who set each one up, their email address, address and postcode. Search by any of those, or by its reference. You choose from the list rather than typing in an ID.
- Waiting for a customer: ones that couldn't be matched to a customer by themselves are marked, and come first.
- Linked to someone else: moving one from another customer, to fix a wrong match, asks you to confirm first.
Replacing or Unlinking Their Direct Debit
- Replace: choose a different Direct Debit from the same list. You're asked to confirm, and their old one waits in Unmatched Direct Debits on your GoCardless settings, in case it's wanted again.
- Unlink: after you confirm, Work Planner stops collecting from it for this customer. It stays set up in GoCardless and waits in Unmatched Direct Debits, so it can be linked to the right customer.
- Recurring payments first: a Direct Debit with recurring payments running on it can't be replaced, unlinked or moved. Cancel them first.
- Not found or ended: when GoCardless doesn't have their Direct Debit, perhaps because it came from another GoCardless account in an import, or it has been cancelled or has expired, the tab says so and nothing is collected with it. Link the right one, or send them a setup link.
Related articles
- Billing Request and Direct Debit Setup Flow: The setup path when the customer still needs a mandate.
- Direct Debit Sign-ups From Your Website: how Direct Debits set up on your website are matched, and the Unmatched Direct Debits list.
- Customer Detail View: Shows where the subscriptions tab sits inside the wider customer record.
- Editing a Customer: Useful if payment integration details need checking before you create a subscription.
- Transferred-Customer Behavior: Important because transferred customers are not normal live editing candidates anymore.