Can you not just keep credit card details on file and charge automatically? That’s what e.g. AWS does, and I can’t use their service without a credit card on file. From personal experience, my issue with b) is that I almost never log into the Bitfolk web portal, so I simply wouldn’t see those warnings. If these customers are ignoring warning email after warning email, what makes you think they would see (or heed) a warning in the panel? Could you also capture mobile contact details and have an automated sms/telegram sent to customers in parallel with the emails? I’d have thought most people would be more likely to receive and acknowledge those types of notifications? Kind regards, Paul Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse brevity, spelling, and punctuation. On 7 Sep 2020, at 23:38, Andy Smith &lt;andy(a)bitfolk.com&gt; wrote: Hello, There is a frequent cause of confusion with Direct Debit. The way Direct Debit works is, first you authorise an organisation to make Direct Debit requests. This is called a Direct Debit mandate. That gets sent to your bank. Once your bank accepts it the organisation can then request funds from your bank. At present BitFolk only requests funds by Direct Debit when there is a mandate in place and: a) A new invoice is created, or; b) You go into the Panel and select one or more invoices to pay by Direct Debit. Notably what does NOT happen ever is that invoices which already exist are suddenly submitted by Direct Debit. So what happens quite often is: 1. Invoice for ongoing service is created and emailed to customer. 2. Customer ignores this for some period of time. 3. A nagging automated email is sent saying this is going to be due soon. Quite often ignored for some time. 4. A more strident yet still automated nagging email is sent saying that it would be a really good idea to consider paying this now as otherwise there might be a loss of service. 5. Customer decides that Direct Debit would be convenient and does authorise a Direct Debit mandate now, but doesn't actually pay the outstanding invoice(s) by any means because they think they have now told us to take payments by Direct Debit and that it will just happen. 6. Invoice is now weeks overdue and an automated email is sent out saying that the service is now going to be suspended for non-payment. 7. Since non-payment suspensions are manual, we think to check if the customer recently authorised a Direct Debit mandate. If they did then we consider it likely that they thought that would do the job, so we have to contact them and explain and ask if they did actually want this existing invoice paid by DD. This is annoyingly manual, takes time, and is sometimes hard to explain. There have been a non-zero number of occasions where we have forgotten to check for a mandate in step #7 and have suspended the customer's service for non-payment. There have been many occasions where customers have received the "you're being suspended for non-payment" email of step #6 and contacted us in a panic. Every time there is one of these misunderstandings I explain why this happened and ask how they would like it to be changed so that it doesn't happen any more, but sadly I have never really received any concrete suggestions even from the people it has happened to. I'm pretty sick of this happening so I want to do something about it. So, I shall ask all of you, how would you expect it to work? a) As soon as a mandate is authorised, just charge all existing invoices immediately Very tempting. Very simple. I fear there will be at least one person that will claim they never expected that to happen, and a returned Direct Debit has caused them to incur an eleventy billion pound penalty charge from their bank, their mortgage payment got rejected, and now there are men outside in shiny leather jackets. b) As soon as the mandate is authorised, if the customer has existing invoices that are unpaid, there is a very noticeable message on the screen like: You seem to have unpaid invoices: #41234 £107.88 #41239 £1.92 Pre-existing invoices won't be automatically submitted for payment by Direct Debit. You can <a href="…">pay them now</a> by a one-off Direct Debit or any of our other supported payment methods. I like (b). I am open to other ideas if you have any. I can't really think of any. I understand that many people will be happy with (a), but I feel it's one of those things that when there is someone that is unhappy, they are very unhappy, and that wipes out the good feelings from the many more people that never had a problem. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ users mailing list users(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users

c) You put a flag on all accounts preventing setting up a Direct Debit if there are outstanding invoices. This forces action by the user either to pay all invoices then set up a DD, or call you to have the flag removed and pay everything by DD. Either way the user should be in no doubt about what happens as a result. Andy, I really appreciate your attitude towards customers, but sometimes I think you do try too hard. If a user has ignored repeated warnings then it’s really not your problem to fix. (Assuming the warnings were actually sent… :P (That was a bit mean, sorry.)) Regards, Chris — Chris Smith &lt;space.dandy(a)icloud.com&gt;

On Mon, Sep 07, 2020 at 10:38:18PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote: Would it be possible to present this option /before/ the customer sets up the DD? Like: And then the UI there is Then it's not more reading/tasks to do after you've done the hard work of setting up the DD. Cheers! -- Iain Lane [ iain(a)orangesquash.org.uk ] Debian Developer [ laney(a)debian.org ] Ubuntu Developer [ laney(a)ubuntu.com ]

On 07/09/2020 23:38, Andy Smith wrote: I'd suggest the customer has a choice of either in this circumstance, but is required to explicitly choose.  To clarify - I'd suggest that, if a customer has outstanding invoices when signing up for DD, they will be forced to select one of two radio buttons before submitting, for example: You have existing outstanding invoices and must choose one of the two options below: * I authorise you to automatically take payment for currently outstanding invoices once the Direct Debit has been set up and (/legalese version of:/ accept responsibility for any fees incurred if this leads to insufficient funds for this or any other payments from my account); OR * I do not authorise you to take automatic payment for currently outstanding invoices.  I will make payment via alternate means or manually authorise payment once the Direct Debit is set up.  I understand that failure to pay will lead to a suspension of service. This would not be shown if they did not have an outstanding debt.  This covers you and hopefully makes it clear to them what, if anything, they will need to do. Gavin

On 07/09/2020 23:38, Andy Smith wrote: [snip explanation] I recall an incident the other way around which irritated me. I had taken out a new credit card and asked if I could set up a DD to pay the whole amount each month. I was told I had to wait for a bill. When I got a bill it had a section on the back, "How to pay this bill" with several options - send a cheque, pay in person at a bank or post office, set up a DD. As the last one was the one which I wanted I immediately filled in the DD bit and sent it back. Job done I thought. Then at the next bill I found they'd applied a penalty because I hadn't paid the last one. When I complained they said it was my fault because I should have paid the first bill by a different method - although there was no indication of this in their instructions. The person to whom I spoke tried to bullshit me by making up non-existent rules about direct debits. I think the reality was that they just weren't set up to cope with that particular scenario. They would have had to send out a separate notice of the proposed debit and their system didn't allow for that. Getting back on topic - I think I would expect that once I've set up a DD with Bitfolk then all my outstanding bills would use it. You have to send out a notice anyway, so I would see the process as: 1. Start with 2 outstanding bills 2. Set up DD mandate 3. Bitfolk immediately sends out notice of intended debit for above bills. 4. Debits happen at earliest legal date And give the customer the option to opt out of this at the point of setting up the DD if they really want to. John -- Xronos Scheduler - https://xronos.uk/ All your school's schedule information in one place. Timetable, activities, homework, public events - the lot Live demo at https://schedulerdemo.xronos.uk/

On Mon, 7 Sep 2020 at 23:38, Andy Smith &lt;andy(a)bitfolk.com&gt; wrote: Personally I think option a would be fine for me, but there is always the possibility it might be an issue and taking your point above I'd be happy with option b. Andy