Collection Timelines

Overview

Acquired will ensure that your Direct Debit payments are collected from your customer's account as per the specified charge date. Each payment collected under an existing mandate follows the Bacs three-day processing cycle, meaning it is submitted to the scheme two working days before the charge date. Notification of the collection being transmitted to the scheme will be confirmed through our collection_submitted webhook.

Direct Debit collections created two days before their specified charge date, which is the earliest possible timeframe, must be established before 7:00 PM to ensure submission to the scheme on the same day and subsequent collection on the charge date.

Collections initiated after 7:00 PM will not be processed by Bacs until the following working day, requiring an additional day for the collection attempt. Additionally, collection requests received on non-working days will be processed on the next available working day.

The Collection Process

Because of the way Direct Debit works, all payments are automatically considered successful on the payment charge date. This status will be officially confirmed through the collection success notification webhook, which is triggered at 11:00 PM.

Notifications of failures are conveyed through another Bacs three-day cycle. Typically, the customer's bank provides this notification on the payment charge date.

Notifications of payment failures are communicated through an additional Bacs three-day cycle. Ordinarily, the customer's bank issues this notification on the payment charge date, resulting in the receipt of the collection declined webhook on Day 1.

However, in approximately 1% of instances, the notification is dispatched only on the next day. Consequently, Acquired do not receive confirmation of the failure until 2 working days post payment charge date.

When Acquired gets a failure notification, the payment will be auto-reversed. Therefore, in some instances a payment cannot be deemed successful until there is no failure notification on day 2.

The Collection Process: new mandate

If you don't already have a mandate with your customer, one needs to be set up before a payment can be collected. This adds an additional Bacs processing cycle.

If we take into account the 1% of cases where failure notifications are submitted are day late, mandate creation through to confirmation of collection can take up to seven working days.