Am I using Dashboard subscriptions or plans?
Head to the “Subscriptions” screen in the GoCardless Dashboard and use the dropdown to filter for the “Active” status. We’ll show you any subscriptions that you’ve set up which are currently active.
If you don’t see any subscriptions listed, then you don’t need to do anything. You can stop following this guide.
Do I need to move my existing customers over?
If you use subscriptions (including plans) in the GoCardless Dashboard to automatically take payments from your customers and want to start using one of our integrations, you’ll need to decide what to do with your existing customers’ payments.
Setting up new customers via the integration is simple. For your existing customers, you need to decide if you want to keep managing their payments through the Dashboard, or if you want to move them over to the partner software.
If you’re happy to keep managing your existing customers through the Dashboard, you can stop following this guide. If you want want to consolidate everything into the integration, read on.
Step-by-step: moving existing customers’ subscriptions to an integration
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
- Make sure you have matching customer records set up in the integration
- Link your customers’ GoCardless mandates to the customers’ records in the integration
- Set up the new regular payments in the integration
- 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.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience - we’re working with our partners to make this process more automatic.
1. Find your active subscriptions
Head to the “Subscriptions” screen in the GoCardless Dashboard and use the dropdown to filter for the “Active” status. We’ll show you any subscriptions that you’ve set up which are currently active — these are the ones which 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. Make sure you have matching customer records set up in the integration
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 software
You now have customer records in GoCardless, and customer records in the partner software. Let’s link them together.
If the integration 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 integration, and then follow the instructions:
If the integration doesn’t support automatically importing mandates from GoCardless, this process will be a bit more manual. We’d suggest sending the partner integration’s support team an email, and explaining that you want to link existing customers you have in GoCardless to your account.
4. Set up the new regular payments in the integration
Now the customers in the integration are linked to their GoCardless mandates, we can set up our recurring payments in the integration 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” screen, click on each subscription to find 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 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.
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 Direct Debit
- You’ve cancelled the old subscriptions you set up in the GoCardless Dashboard, so now the partner software can take over