gocardless and existing agreements

Question

What happens when a CiviCRM membership creates a gocardless payment within CiviCRM if he or she already has a gocardless payment made to our organisation but outside of CiviCRM? Do we just have to trace these manually and resolve? Thanks

Answer 1

If someone signs up to a membership using a CiviContribute page with GoCardless, then they will have:

• a new Customer
• a new Mandate
• that mandate will have a new Subscription

Any previous mandates are completely unrelated, as far as the system is concerned.

This does not necessarily need to be sorted out, but of course that's a judgement that needs operational understanding to make really.

If it's the case that they were already paying, say £10/month, to your org for that membership, such that they now are paying twice, then of course this must be sorted out, and the way to do that would be to cancel their old one at manage.gocardless.com which will leave the Civi one active.

EDIT

If you have existing GoCardless mandates, subscriptions set up by non-CiviCRM means, and you want them to show up in CiviCRM, this will require some developer time to make sure it's done properly. It can be a fairly simple thing to do, and there are various non-general-use example scripts (code) available for a developer to adapt and reuse. Though, if you have already been imported GoCardless data as Contributions (for example) then this can get quite difficult, depending on how they've been imported before.