WPdirectdebit User Guide

Welcome! This guide walks through every page of the WPdirectdebit admin area, page by page and panel by panel. Whether you’re evaluating the plugin or using it daily, this is the complete tour.

WPdirectdebit puts your entire Direct Debit operation inside WordPress: build embedded payment forms your customers never have to leave your site to use, watch sign-ups turn into mandates and payouts in real time, manage any customer or subscription from one page, and make bulk changes in minutes with a full audit trail. The GoCardless dashboard is always one click away when you want it — but you’ll find you rarely need it.

Before you start

Watch the videos provided on this Video Guides page. They will orientate you around using WPdirectdebit. And always explore and test in Sandbox mode first, not Live. Sandbox behaves exactly like Live but never touches a real bank or moves real money, so it’s the safe place to click around, build forms, and get a feel for the plugin. GoCardless makes this easy — you can sign up for a free sandbox account in a couple of minutes, separately from any live account, then connect it under WPdirectdebit → Settings and switch the mode toggle to Sandbox.

Tips:

  • Build a dedicated test form. Don’t run test sign-ups through the same form real customers will use — create a throwaway copy for testing instead. That keeps test entries from mixing in with genuine ones, so you’re never hunting through real customer data to find (or clean up) a test sign-up later.
  • Use GoCardless’s published test bank details, not a real account, when you reach the bank step of a sandbox sign-up. See GoCardless’s test bank details for the full list by country — for a quick UK test, sort code 20-00-00 and account number 55779911 will work.
  • Add your Licence Key. You’ll find it in your welcome email — paste it into WPdirectdebit → Settings → Licence Key as soon as you’re set up. It’s what keeps the plugin receiving automatic updates.

A quick note on how links behave throughout the plugin:

  • Links that open GoCardless (usually coloured gold – payment IDs, mandate IDs, payout references) open the corresponding record in your GoCardless dashboard in a new tab.
  • Links that stay inside WordPress (usually coloured blue – customer names, form titles, the counters on the Dashboard) take you to another WPdirectdebit page with more detail.

The Dashboard Page

WPdirectdebit → Dashboard

This is your home page and mission control. See how money is flowing, which forms are performing, who signed up recently, and whether your GoCardless connection is healthy.

Payouts received panel

This panel at the top of the dashboard contains a live chart of the money GoCardless has actually paid out to your bank account. Use the 7d / 30d / 90d buttons to switch the period, and hover over the line to see the exact amount and date of any payout. The headline figure above the chart is your total for the selected period.

If you haven’t connected GoCardless yet, the chart politely points you to Settings instead.

Your Forms panel

Every payment form on your site is listed here in one table — split into Recurring Payments and Payments sections so you can see your subscription products separately from your one-off payment forms.

Each row shows:

  • Form — the form’s name. Click it to open the form’s detail, with its full sign-up history and payment link generator.
  • Details — the payment type, amount, and frequency at a glance, e.g. “Recurring Payment £300.00 / annually +£15.00 upfront”. Where the customer chooses their own amount, you’ll see “variable”.
  • Entries — how many times the form has been submitted. Click the counter to open the entries list in Gravity Forms (new tab), where the raw submission data lives.
  • Sign-ups — how many of those submissions actually reached GoCardless and became a mandate, payment, or subscription. Click it to open the form’s detail view. The distinction between Entries and Sign-ups is useful: a big gap between the two tells you people are starting your form but dropping out at the bank-authorisation step.
  • Edit — opens the form in the Gravity Forms editor (new tab) so you can adjust fields, copy, or layout.

Three buttons live in the panel header:

  • Build Recurring Payment — opens the form builder to create a complete subscription sign-up form in about a minute. You choose the amount (fixed, or let the customer decide), billing frequency (fixed, or let the customer choose weekly/monthly/annually), number of payments (ongoing or a fixed count), an optional preferred collection day of month, an optional free-trial delay, and an optional one-off upfront fee collected at sign-up. WPdirectdebit generates a ready-to-use Gravity Form — fields, validation, plan summary, payment plan text (Direct Debit guarantee is pre-completed) — and opens it in the editor for any finishing touches.
  • Build Payment — this is the same idea but for one-off payments. Where your currency supports it, you can choose between Instant Bank Pay (money collected in real time at sign-up) and Direct Debit (mandate set up, payment collected shortly after).
  • Scan GoCardless — takes you to the Scan page, which reads your existing GoCardless account and offers to rebuild your current payment arrangements as embedded forms. If you’re migrating from GoCardless payment links, this is your fast lane. Why this matters: Forms built here are embedded on your own pages, styled to match your site, with the amount and terms the customer chose — something a static GoCardless payment link can’t do.

Form detail view

Dashboard → click any form name

Here’s everything about one form: who signed up, every status, and details of the sign-up form.

← All Forms returns you to the Dashboard.

Create a Payment Link / Create a Recurring Payment Link

This panel turns any form into a shareable link and QR code — perfect for invoices, email signatures, printed materials, or a card by the till.

Choose the Page where the form lives. The dropdown groups pages that already contain this form (“Contains this form”) ahead of the rest, and you can also paste a Custom URL if the form is embedded somewhere unusual (a PHP template, a widget) or to add your own code to the URL e.g. for tracking. If you pick a page where the plugin can’t detect the form, you’ll see a warning but the link will still work if the form is genuinely there.

For one-off payment forms, enter the Amount and an optional Description (e.g. “Invoice #1234”). The link pre-fills both, so the customer just confirms and pays.

For recurring payment forms, you may see an optional Upfront fee field with a description. This relates to a one-off charge (a joining fee, say) collected at the same time as the mandate is set up. It only appears for forms that were built without a fixed upfront fee already. If the form has a fixed upfront fee baked in, this field won’t show.

Click Generate Link.

You get a ready-to-share package: a QR code card showing your form name, the amount, and payment terms (download it as a PNG with Download QR), plus the link itself with a Copy button.

How this helps you: a customer scans the code or clicks the link, lands directly on your payment form with everything pre-filled, and signs up in moments — no account creation, no navigating your site, no friction. Anyone on your team can generate these; no technical knowledge needed. Paste into emails, flyers or add to your checkout desk if you have one.

Recent Sign-ups panel

Lists the ten most recent sign-ups across all your forms, so you can see the state of things without digging. Each row shows:

  • Date of the sign-up.
  • Form — click to open the form in the editor.
  • Customer — the name and email of the person who signed up. Click through to their customer page in WPdirectdebit, with their mandates, payments, and subscriptions all in one place.
  • Status — a colour-coded pill showing exactly where this sign-up is in its journey:green for active/paid (“Mandate active”, “Recurring payment active”, “Paid out”)
    yellow for in-progress (“Mandate pending”, “Submitted”)
    orange for retrying
    red for problems (“Payment failed”, “Setup failed”)
    grey for finished or expired.These statuses update automatically via webhooks.

GoCardless Connection panel

On the right hand side you can see your connection health, at a glance:

  • Organisation — the GoCardless account this site is connected to.
  • Environment — a badge showing SANDBOX or LIVE, so there’s never any doubt which mode you’re in.
  • Status — Connected (green) or Not connected (red).
  • Webhook — Saved (green) or Not configured (amber). Webhooks are how GoCardless tells your site about payment events, so amber here is worth addressing — head to Settings.

If GoCardless needs you to complete account verification, or your encryption salt is missing from wp-config.php, a clear warning appears here too. Problems surface on the Dashboard rather than hiding in a settings page.

At a glance panel

Here, below the GoCardless Connection panel, resides your key GoCardless account numbers. Get an overview without leaving WordPress. Most rows are clickable and deep-link straight into the relevant filtered view:

  • Next payout — the amount and expected arrival date of your next payout. Click through to the Payouts page filtered to pending.
  • Pending payouts — money GoCardless has collected but not yet paid out to you, with a count. Click through to see them.
  • Pending payments — payments awaiting customer approval. Click through to the Payments page pre-filtered.
  • Collected this month — your running monthly total.
  • Failed payments — shown in red when non-zero. Click straight through to the Payments page filtered to failures, so problems are one click from triage.
  • Active customers — how many customers currently have an active mandate. Click through to the Customers page filtered to active.
  • Sign-ups this month — with a comparison against the same point last month, so you can see momentum (“+4 vs last month so far”).

GoCardless aggregates these figures daily (around 13:30 UTC), so treat them as a daily snapshot rather than a live ticker.

Sign-ups

The full sign-up history for this form — not just the raw submissions, but what became of each one at the bank.

Filter by Status (mandate active, awaiting mandate, payment failed, cancelled, and more) or by date range. Click any column heading to sort. Each row shows:

  • Entry — the Gravity Forms entry number. Click it to open the full submission in Gravity Forms, with every field the customer filled in.
  • Date and Customer (name/email).
  • Status — the same colour-coded pills as the Dashboard, kept current by webhooks.
  • Details — what this sign-up created: type, amount, frequency, upfront fee, and the Direct Debit scheme used (e.g. BACS).
  • GoCardless — direct links to the mandate (M:) and subscription (S:) records in your GoCardless dashboard. Follow these when you want the source-of-truth record — the full event log, bank details status, and anything else GoCardless holds.

Scan GoCardless

Dashboard → Scan GoCardless button

If you already use GoCardless via payment links, dashboard-created subscriptions, or another integration — this page is your migration assistant. It scans your GoCardless account and groups everything it finds into your actual payment arrangements.

The scan runs automatically when you arrive (there’s a Re-scan button for later). Results are split into Recurring Payments and One-offs, and each row shows:

  • Name — the subscription or payment name as it appears in GoCardless.
  • Type — recurring Direct Debit, DD mandate + one-off, or instant payment.
  • Scheme — BACS, SEPA, ACH, and so on.
  • Details — amount (or “Various amounts” where customers paid different figures), frequency, number of payments, preferred collection day.
  • Count — how many are active, paused, ended, collected, or pending.

And the actions:

  • Build Recurring Payment / Build Payment — the headline feature. One click opens the form builder pre-filled with that group’s exact configuration — name, amount, currency, frequency, scheme, collection day. Your existing GoCardless product becomes an embedded form on your website in under a minute, and new sign-ups slot in alongside the existing ones.
  • Edit form — once a group has a form, the button switches to open it in the Gravity Forms editor.
  • Update amount — for recurring groups with active subscriptions, this jumps straight to the Recurring Payments page in bulk-edit mode, pre-filtered to exactly this group. Raising the price of a plan across fifty subscribers becomes a two-minute job (see “Bulk edit” below).

The benefit: You can quickly start using WPdirectdebit to collect payments in the same way as you already do, even if you don’t have much experience setting up forms.

The Customers Page

WPdirectdebit → Customers

Your complete GoCardless customer list, browsable and searchable without leaving WordPress.

At the top, four filters show your customer base by mandate state, each with a live count: All, Active mandate (paying customers), Inactive mandate (mandates that failed, expired, or were cancelled), and Pending (mid-setup). One click filters the list.

Below that:

  • Search — find customers by name, email, or company. If there are more matches beyond the first batch, the plugin tells you and offers to search the next 500.
  • Load — how many customers to fetch from GoCardless (25–500).
  • Export — download the current view as a CSV, ready for your CRM, mailing list, or spreadsheet analysis. What you see is what you export — filters apply.

The table shows name, email, company, city, postcode, country, mandate state (colour-coded pill), and created date. Click the Name, Company, or Created headings to sort.

Click any row to open that customer’s detail page.

The Customer Detail Page

Customers → click any customer (also reachable from customer links throughout the plugin).

Everything about one customer on a single page — this is the view a support conversation needs. The breadcrumb at the top takes you back to the customer list, and the customer’s GoCardless ID in the header links to their record in the GoCardless dashboard.

Customer details

Name, email, company, phone, address, language, and created date. Click Edit to update any of these — changes save straight back to GoCardless, so the record stays correct everywhere.

Bank Accounts

The customer’s bank accounts as GoCardless knows them: account holder, bank name, the last two digits of the account number (never more — bank details stay with GoCardless, which is exactly where you want them), currency, and enabled/disabled status. Each ID links to the GoCardless record.

Mandates

The customer’s Direct Debit mandates — the authorisations that let you collect payment. Each row shows the reference, scheme, status, next possible charge date, and created date, with the ID linking to GoCardless. Actions:

  • Edit — manage the metadata attached to a mandate.
  • Cancel — cancel an active mandate. The plugin warns you first: cancelling a mandate also cancels any active recurring payments attached to it.
  • Reinstate — bring a cancelled mandate back into use, where the scheme allows it.

Recurring Payments

The customer’s subscriptions: name, amount, frequency, status, start date, payment count (∞ for ongoing), and the linked mandate. Paused subscriptions helpfully show when they’ll resume. Actions per row:

  • Pause — with three flexible options: pause until further notice, pause until a date you pick (the plugin calculates exactly how many billing cycles to skip so no payment is taken before your date, and tells you when payments will resume), or pause for a set number of cycles.
  • Resume — restart a paused subscription; the plugin shows you the date of the first collection before you confirm.
  • Cancel — permanently end the subscription (confirmation required).
  • Edit — change the name, amount, bank-statement payment reference, or metadata.

Payments

Every payment for this customer, newest first, with a running total in the header. Each row shows the charge date, amount, status, description, and linked mandate — IDs link to GoCardless. Actions appear when the payment’s status allows:

  • Retry — re-attempt a failed payment.
  • Cancel — stop a payment that hasn’t been submitted to the banks yet.
  • Refund — full or partial (available once the payment has been paid out and cleared the safer-refund window).

The benefit: when a customer emails asking “why was I charged twice?” or “can you pause my plan while I’m away?”, this one page answers the question and performs the fix — no GoCardless login, no tab-switching, no copy-pasting IDs.

Remember: Like every other GoCardless app, while it can display most types of GoCardless resources, WPdirectdebit can only amend those resources that it created.

The Payouts Page

WPdirectdebit → Payouts

Every transfer GoCardless has made (or is about to make) to your bank account.

Filter by Status (pending, paid, bounced) and arrival date range, choose how many to Show, and Export the lot to CSV — your bookkeeper will thank you.

The table shows the payout Reference (which links to the payout in the GoCardless dashboard, where you can see exactly which payments it bundles together), arrival date, created date, Amount, Fees deducted (GoCardless’s commission, itemised per payout), and status. Sort by created date or amount.

Why it matters: this page reconciles your bank statement. The amount that landed in your account, the fee that was deducted, and the reference on the statement are all here, matched up.

The Recurring Payments Page

WPdirectdebit → Recurring Payments

Every subscription in your GoCardless account — searchable, filterable, and manageable individually or in bulk. This page is where WPdirectdebit really earns its keep.

Finding things

Filter by Status (active, paused, cancelled, finished…), exact Amount, Frequency (the dropdown builds itself from the frequencies that actually exist in your data), and created date range. Search matches across names, customers, references, and amounts. Load controls how many records to fetch (25–500), and Export downloads the current list as CSV.

The table shows customer (linked to their detail page), name, amount, status, frequency, start date, created date, and payment count. Paused rows show their resume date. Sort by clicking column headings.

Individual actions

Just like on the customer page: Pause (until further notice, until a date, or for a set number of cycles), Resume (with the first-collection date shown before you confirm), Cancel, and Edit (name, amount, payment reference, metadata).

Remember: GoCardless only lets the app that created a subscription pause, resume, or edit it. Subscriptions created by WPdirectdebit forms are fully manageable here; ones created by other integrations can still be viewed and cancelled, and this app will tell you clearly when that’s the case.

Bulk edit

Click Bulk edit in the header and the page transforms. Checkboxes appear on every eligible row (active or paused), with a select-all in the header — untick anyone you want to leave out. Then use the two action cards:

Update amount — change the price of many subscriptions at once, three ways:

  • Set to fixed amount — everyone moves to the same new price.
  • Add or subtract amount — e.g. +£2.50 across the board.
  • Change by percentage — e.g. +5% annual increase, applied to each subscriber’s own current amount.

The button tells you exactly how many subscriptions will be affected before you click. A progress bar tracks the run; any failures or skips are itemised with reasons.

Pause / Resume — pause every selected active subscription (with the same three pause methods, including “no payment before this date” applied intelligently per subscription), or resume every paused one.

When a bulk run finishes you can Export full report or Export issues only — a CSV of every subscription touched, its outcome, and the reason. A proper audit trail for your records, produced automatically.

Save time and errors: Imagine you have a thousand subscribers but, due to price increases, discounts and special offers, a wide range of prices are being applied. You want to adjust prices by a percentage for inflation. With WPdirectdebit, all you do is filter, review the list, set the percentage change, click once, export the report. Done. That’s probably just paid for WPdirectdebit in time saved.

The Payments Page

WPdirectdebit → Payments

Every individual payment — subscription collections, one-off payments, upfront fees — in one filterable list.

Filter by Status (pending, confirmed, paid out, failed, cancelled, charged back…), charge date range, and free-text Search; control how many to Show; Export to CSV. The Dashboard’s “Failed payments” and “Pending payments” links land here with the filter already applied.

Each row shows the Customer (linked to their detail page), description, amount, colour-coded status, Type (subscription collection, one-off, Instant Bank Pay), and charge date. Actions appear where the payment’s status allows:

  • Cancel — for payments not yet submitted to the banks.
  • Refund — GoCardless holds new payments for 7 days after the charge date before allowing a refund (a fraud-protection measure on their side), and the payment must already show as Paid out. Once both are true, the Refund button appears; a confirmation step shows anything already refunded before you confirm the amount.

The Settings Page

WPdirectdebit → Settings

Your site-wide configuration settings

  • GoCardless Connection — connect Live and Sandbox via OAuth (each connects separately), and switch the active mode with the LIVE/SANDBOX toggle. Switching to Live prompts you to add a dedicated encryption salt to wp-config.php — the plugin generates the exact line for you with copy-paste instructions.
  • License Key — paste the license key from your welcome email here to enable automatic plugin updates. Once entered, you’ll see whether your license is active or has expired. If you connect to GoCardless above, this fills in automatically once your subscription is active — but there’s no need to wait for that; pasting your key here works on its own.
  • Connection Settings — webhook secrets for each mode, and your site’s webhook endpoint URL ready to copy into the GoCardless dashboard (with a direct link to the right page in the right environment).
  • GoCardless Settings — default country, transaction limits, mandate verification level, purpose code, Intelligent Retries (Success+), and metadata options. Every field has a tooltip (ⓘ) explaining what it does and any GoCardless plan requirements.
  • Payment References — per-scheme bank-statement references (BACS, SEPA, ACH, Autogiro, Betalingsservice, BECS, BECS NZ), each with its scheme’s length rules built into the field.
  • Diagnostics — debug logging (great while testing, noisy in production) and a log viewer.
  • Audit Log — optional monthly CSV record of every pause, resume, cancellation, and amendment to recurring payments. Turn it on if you need a compliance trail.
  • Custom CSS — style the plugin’s frontend elements (plan summary, Direct Debit guarantee) to match your site.
  • Uninstall — choose whether plugin data is removed on uninstall.