The WPdirectdebit dashboard shown above is accessed via the Settings menu within the WordPress dashboard. The WPdirectdebit dashboard has been considerably enhanced in release 3.

In release 2 you’ve been able to list your customers and step through them 50 at a time. Now with release 3, you also have three ways to order the listing – by date of creation, or alphabetically by name or by company name.

You can also reverse the order of display. This should make it much easier for you to find the customer record you are looking for.

Release 3 also provides support for metadata. GoCardless provides for three metadata key/value pairs to be stored with resources such as mandates and payments. Any customer metadata stored with the customer record is displayed in the right hand column in the format [Key] => Value. In this example, the metadata is being used to store marketing preferences.

In release 2, clicking on the customer ID would hotlink to the customer record in the GoCardless dashboard. In release 3, the link focuses in on the customer record, displaying the customer bank accounts, mandates, and payments on a single screen.

If you still wish to view the customer record in the GoCardless dashboard, you can, by clicking on the customer ID highlighted in yellow on this screen.

Wherever you see a resource ID highlighted in yellow, it will do the same – taking you directly to the resource at GoCardless.

The payouts tab displays payouts in date created order starting with the most recent, making it easy to keep track of your income.

Release 3 also brings you much enhanced capabilities on the payments tab.

You can list your payments in order of amount or by charge date. It’s also possible to change the order simply by clicking the small arrow. You can filter the payments by status as well. There’s a new column for metadata too.

The subscriptions tab brings new functionality, just as for the payments tab.

You can filter on the status of the subscription. You’ll see metadata displayed in its own column. In this example, it’s been used to indicate whether gift aid applies to the subscription.

Management tabs

The payment, subscription and mandate tabs on the right, with the little gearwheel icons, are management tabs for these resources. They are designed to be used in conjunction with a management form which you can create quite easily yourself using Gravity Forms. For example, let’s say you want to amend a subscription because the price has risen. You might start on the customers tab, to locate the customer. In our example, the second one down, Candy Carpenter. If we click on her customer ID and examine her customer record, we see she has a magazine subscription costing £10 monthly. Clicking on the subscription ID opens up the subscription management tab with the subscription ID already populated.

We previously created the subscription management form you see here, so all we need to do here is enter the new amount and submit the form.

You can amend the amount, the description and the metadata all in one go should you need to, or just leave the items blank that don’t need to be amended.

Tip: Updating Metadata. Metadata has two parts – the key and the value. You can only amend the value on the form. But if you wanted to amend the key at the same time, you could enter a different key in the metadata area of the form feed. Then both the new key and the value will be updated when you submit the form.