I can see that FreeAgent meta is sent to GoCardless when a payment is raised in the form of fa_invoice_id etc, but I can’t seem to see anything for the customer?
Due to customers not receiving our mandate request emails sent via FreeAgent (junk mail) we sometimes have to send them to ourselves and then on to the customers. It would then be great to use the GoCardless API to update customers email addresses as FreeAgent sends our email address instead of the customers, we need the customer ID todo this.
Even better would be to allow us to retrieve a link to sign the DD from you and then we could fully automate our signup without having to use work arounds.
I’m afraid it isn’t currently possible from within FreeAgent for you to access directly the mandate setup links that get sent out to contacts.
It would then be great to use the GoCardless API to update customers email addresses as FreeAgent sends our email address instead of the customers, we need the customer ID todo this.
Would you be able to clarify this please, as I’m not quite sure I understand? Do you mean that because you send the mandate invitation to yourself before forwarding it on to your client, they sometimes go ahead and set up the mandate with GoCardless but using your email address rather than filling in their own?
In the meantime, I will raise your use case with the team.
We have to send the mandate from FreeAgent to ourselves (as the one FreeAgent sends always hits customers Junk folder) and then forward onto customers. This sets the incorrect email within GoCardless, we need to then update it to the customers actual address
We’ve been discussing this on the team and we have some ideas about how we may be able to help:
We could add a fa_client_id field to the metadata sent to GoCardless.
We could look at making it possible to copy the client’s mandate setup link from the contact page once a mandate request has been sent.
We might be able to replicate the “Email copy to sender” option from the invoice email form to mandate requests, thus enabling you to forward it manually if necessary.
With the caveat that these are just suggestions that we’d need to explore fully before making any promises, would any of them solve your issue? Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I’m also concerned that your mandate request emails are ending up in your customers’ junk folders - is this happening with every email?
Thanks for coming back to me - I missed the notification!
Attaching an fa_client_id would be perfect and would solve marrying up FreeAgent contacts with GoCardless customers and would allow us to work around the issue of updating email addresses (and other customer data) within GoCardless. I think this would be a great addition for others as well.
Option 2 & 3 probably wouldn’t be much help. We’ve hit another problem with FreeAgents permission structure in that we have to grant users invoicing access to allow them to be able to send DD mandates - which we don’t want to do. Because they can’t send them themselves a manager needs to login and send out the DD mandates which delays our sales processes.
The only way that FreeAgents DD system will work for us would be for an endpoint to be created allowing us to send the DD mandate via the API, which I realise is probably asking too much. This is a shame because we really like how it all clips together.
I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re probably outgrowing FreeAgent (which has done us proud)! We’re currently assessing whether it’s viable for us to handle the DD integration with GoCardless directly (broadly speaking creating the mandates, requesting the funds and paying the invoices) or whether we completely switch to another platform that already has this available.
