A direct debit mandate is your customer's authorisation for you to collect payments from their bank account. If one gets cancelled, you can usually set it up again in a couple of clicks.
How you'll know
Adfin tells you three ways:
An alert on your home dashboard, under Actions Required, with a Reinstate button.
An email from Adfin, with a reinstate link straight to the right place.
Your customer gets an email too, letting them know their mandate has been cancelled.
You'll also find Reinstate direct debit mandate at the bottom of the customer's panel in the Customers list.
Before you reinstate
Reinstating reuses the bank details Adfin already holds. Don't reinstate if:
Your customer hasn't confirmed the cancellation wasn't them. Please check with them first.
The activity log says they told their bank a payment was unauthorised. Speak to them, and only send a fresh mandate once they've agreed.
They're changing bank accounts. The old details won't work. If they're using the UK bank account switching service, the mandate carries over on its own and Adfin picks it up. If not, cancel the mandate and send a fresh request so they can enter their new details.
How to reinstate
Click Reinstate on the dashboard alert, in your email, or at the bottom of the customer's detail panel.
Check the bank details on file: account holder name, account number and sort code.
Click Reinstate.
The new mandate goes straight to Active. There's nothing for your customer to do, though they'll get an email confirming it, and the reinstate shows in their activity log.
Then switch outstanding invoices back to Auto Collect
When the mandate was cancelled, Adfin moved that customer's unpaid invoices from Auto Collect to On Demand. Reinstating doesn't move them back, so they stay on On Demand, and any that are overdue show as At Risk, until you switch them.
There are two ways to do it:
For this customer, now: open each invoice in the Payments view and change its collection method back to Auto Collect.
Automatically from now on: open the customer's collection agent, click Customise payment options, and set Which payments should be moved to Auto Collect once authorised? to New and existing payments. Outstanding invoices then move across on their own whenever a customer on that agent authorises a mandate.
That setting applies to everyone on the agent, and only from the next authorisation onwards. Invoices already sitting on On Demand still need switching by hand.
Either way, new invoices you raise for this customer use Auto Collect.
If it keeps getting cancelled
Banks don't always tell us why they've cancelled a mandate. Where they do, it shows in the activity log on the customer record, for example that your customer cancelled with their bank, the account was closed, or they told their bank a payment was unauthorised.
The most common cause, especially if it cancels again soon after you reinstate, is the account holder name not matching the name the bank holds. If that's happening:
Check the name on the customer record exactly matches the name on their bank account.
Ask your customer to contact their bank for more detail on the cancellation.
Stop reinstating and send a fresh mandate request instead, so they can set it up again themselves.
A processing error at the bank can also cause it. Those are one-offs, and nothing either side has done wrong.
Common questions
Does my customer need to authorise the mandate again? No. Reinstate creates a new mandate from the details Adfin already holds. They'll get a confirmation email, but there's nothing for them to do.
What happens to collections while the mandate is cancelled? Invoices move to On Demand, so your customer can still pay by card, bank transfer, Apple Pay or Google Pay.
Why doesn't Adfin switch invoices back to Auto Collect automatically? By default it leaves that call to you. If you'd rather it happened on its own, set the agent's Which payments should be moved to Auto Collect once authorised? option to New and existing payments.
I reinstated and got another cancellation email straight away. Is something broken? No, both emails are genuine updates from the bank. It means the bank is rejecting the same issue again, so send a fresh mandate request rather than reinstating.