How to move subscriptions to an app

Most of our partner integrations (including Xero, QuickBooks and teamup) don’t support automatically moving your existing subscriptions into their software.

This means that you’ll need to set up your customers’ regular payments again in the partner’s software, and then cancel the subscriptions you currently have set up in GoCardless. The process looks like this:

Find your active subscriptions in your GoCardless dashboard
Ensure you have matching customer records set up in the partner app
Link your customers’ GoCardless mandates to the customers’ records in the partner app
Set up the new regular payments in the partner app
Raise a ticket with our Support team to request cancellation of your customers' subscriptions - we'll do this silently to ensure your customers don't receive a cancellation notification
Check that you’ve set everything up correctly

If you’re using GoCardless for Xero, the process looks a little different. Head to our guide to Moving existing customers’ subscriptions to Xero for more details.

1. Find your active subscriptions in your GoCardless dashboard

Head to the Subscriptions page of your GoCardless dashboard and use the status dropdown to filter for “Active” subscriptions. This will show you any subscriptions that you’ve set up, which are currently active — these are the ones we’ll move over.

When you click on a subscription in the list, you’ll be able to see details including the customer it’s attached to, how often the customer is charged and when the next payment is due to be taken.

2. Ensure you have matching customer records set up in the partner app

For each of your customers in GoCardless with active subscriptions, make sure you have a customer record set up in the partner software.

You’ll usually set up new customers in the “Customers” section of the partner software — but sometimes it might be called something else (like “Clients” or “Members”).

3. Link your customers’ GoCardless mandates to the customers’ records in the partner app

You now have customer records in GoCardless, and customer records in the partner software. You’ll need to link them together.

If the software you’re using is listed below, you can follow their respective guide to do this in just a few clicks. Just click on the name of the application, and then follow the instructions:

If the partner software doesn’t support automatically importing mandates from GoCardless, this process will be a bit more manual. We’d suggest sending the partner application’s support team an email explaining that you want to link existing customers you have in GoCardless to your account.

4. Set up the new regular payments in the partner app

Now that the customers are linked to their GoCardless mandates in the partner software, we can set up our recurring payments in the partner app with the same amount and frequency as before.

If you’ve got a relatively small number of subscriptions, then keep following this guide. If you’ve got lots of subscriptions (we’d suggest more than 40), then head to our guide to using a spreadsheet to make the flow easier.

From the Subscriptions page, click on each subscription to find out which customer is being charged, when, and how much.

Now, set up the same payments up in the partner software:

For invoicing software (e.g. Xero or QuickBooks), you should set up a recurring invoice for the same amount as the subscription.
For membership software (e.g. teamup), you will need to set up a membership subscription.

To keep the customers’ payments the same as they were before, make sure you set up the new payment schedule so the customer is charged on the same day. The “Subscription timeline” in the dashboard will help you work out when the next payment is due to be charged.

If the next payment is due in less than 7 days, we’d suggest setting up the new payment schedule for the following due date, to make sure that customers are not accidentally double-charged.

5. Ensure you customers' Dashboard subscriptions are cancelled to avoid duplicate charges

Now we’ve set up the same payment schedule in the partner software, we can cancel the existing subscriptions set up in the GoCardless dashboard, and let the partner software take over.

You can cancel the dashboard subscriptions yourself via your GoCardless dashboard, however doing so will result in your customers receiving an email notifying them of the cancellation.

To avoid your customers being notified, please instead raise a ticket with our Support team requesting cancellation of your customers' subscriptions and we will action this silently for you. If you are a partner raising this on behalf of a merchant you will be required to provide additional details to pass security.

Please note: If a customer’s next payment is due within the next 7 days and you’ve set up the new payments in the partner software to start from the following due date, then you’ll need to wait until the first payment has been taken before the subscription is cancelled. You should take a note to remind you to do this.

6. Check that you've set everything up correctly

At this point, let’s check that we haven’t made any mistakes in the process. You should double-check that:

You have a customer record set up in the partner software for every customer with an active subscription
Each customer record in the partner software has been linked to their GoCardless mandate
You’ve set up the new recurring payments in the partner software, to be taken by bank debit
You’ve cancelled the old subscriptions you set up in the GoCardless dashboard, so now the partner software can take over