Taking Direct Debit payments with GoCardless

Vento produces a proposal for the installer's customer. When the customer signs it, they are shown a payment page and can pay the deposit or the balance. GoCardless is one of the methods on that page.

Vento is a GoCardless partner. Payments are created on the installer's own GoCardless account over OAuth — the money never passes through Vento, and Vento never holds the installer's bank details or their customers'.

In Vento, go to Settings → Payments and click Connect GoCardless. You are taken to GoCardless to sign in — or to create an account if you do not have one — and asked to authorise Vento. Your email address, business name and country are passed across so you do not have to retype them.

Approving returns you to Vento, where the connection shows as connected. Nothing is charged, and no payment method appears to your customers until you switch Direct Debit on.

You can disconnect at any time from the same screen, or revoke Vento's access from inside your GoCardless dashboard.

On the payment page, choosing Direct Debit (GoCardless)sends the customer to a GoCardless-hosted page. Vento uses GoCardless's hosted pages throughout — it does not collect bank details on its own screens.

Two things are set up on that page at once:

• The payment due now — the deposit or balance, collected by Instant Bank Pay so it confirms within minutes.
• A Bacs Direct Debit mandate — so you can collect the balance, or future servicing, without sending another link.

The customer's name and email are pre-filled from the proposal they just signed. They can change them.

GoCardless notifies Vento over a webhook. When the payment is confirmed, Vento records it against the job, marks the proposal paid, and files a receipt in the job's documents. You do not key anything in.

A failed, cancelled or charged-back payment records nothing and is raised as an alert instead, so a proposal is never marked paid for money that did not arrive.

Vento adds a platform fee of 0.2%of each payment, passed to GoCardless as an application fee and shown on your GoCardless statement. GoCardless's own transaction fees are unchanged and are a matter between you and GoCardless.

The fee is deducted from the payment, not added to it: your customer never pays more because of it. The fraction of a penny is always rounded in your favour.

• OAuth (read_write) to connect a merchant account.
• Billing Requests with a payment_request (Faster Payments) and a mandate_request (Bacs), both GBP.
• Billing Request Flows for the hosted pages, with customer details pre-filled.
• payment_request[app_fee] for the 0.2% platform fee.
• Webhooks for payment confirmation, failure and charge-back.

Email hello@ventogroup.uk and we will help you get set up.

Press and partner use: high-resolution Vento logo (PNG).