Our Bulk Uploads tool makes it easy to set up payments for many customers at once.
We generate a CSV template with a list of your mandates, and you simply fill in the payments you want to collect from each customer. You then upload the completed CSV back to the tool, and we'll check everything looks okay (for example the customers' names in the spreadsheet match those we hold about them) before submitting the payments.
If your customers' details contain accents or other special characters, you might experience issues when we run our automated checks.
This is because spreadsheet software like Excel by default doesn't understand the special characters in the file, so when you save it and upload it back to us, the special characters are corrupted, and the details no longer match up. This is because Excel doesn't handle what is called "UTF-8 encoding" properly.
On Excel on Windows, you can fix this by using the "Import Text File" tool to open the CSV file - click here for a step-by-step video walkthrough:
On Mac, Excel isn't able to open UTF-8 encoded files at all. You'll need to use alternative spreadsheet software (for example Apple's Numbers) or edit the CSV file carefully using a text editor.