GoCardless collects payments straight from customers’ bank accounts, by Direct Debit or open banking. It was incorporated in London in 2011, is authorised by the FCA, and processes more than $130 billion a year for over 100,000 businesses in more than 30 countries.
In September 2026, Mollie completed its purchase of GoCardless, which carries on as GoCardless, a Mollie company, with no immediate changes to services or contracts.
Direct Debit, and more
In the UK, GoCardless runs on Bacs Direct Debit, and it also covers the main schemes abroad, from SEPA across Europe to ACH in the US. Customers are protected by the Direct Debit Guarantee, which gives a full, immediate refund from their bank if anything goes wrong.
Pay by Bank takes one-off payments through open banking and settles the same or next day. In June 2026, GoCardless launched recurring Pay by Bank in the UK, which falls back to Direct Debit when a customer’s bank doesn’t support it.
Two add-ons protect the money. Success+ uses machine learning to retry failed payments on the day they’re most likely to succeed, and Protect+ screens risky payers before they sign up.
Where GoCardless plugs in
GoCardless lists more than 350 integrations, including Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Zuora and Chargebee. In July 2026, Sage added Pay by Bank to its small business accounting software through GoCardless.
Xero has two of its own. GoCardless in Xero, launched in April 2021, sits inside Xero’s online payments with no separate dashboard. The older GoCardless for Xero app runs from a dashboard of its own.
When an invoice shows paid in Xero
Direct Debit takes days to settle, and that shapes what “paid” means. In the UK, a payment on an existing mandate leaves the customer’s account two working days after GoCardless submits it. A failure notice can still arrive after that, so the payment isn’t complete until day four passes without one, and the money reaches the business after about five working days.
GoCardless marks the Xero invoice paid on the day it collects the payment, and posts the full amount to a clearing account instead of the bank account. If the payment then fails, the invoice shows as outstanding again.
The Direct Debit Guarantee adds a longer tail. There’s no time limit on a customer’s claim, and their bank refunds them without checking with the business first. The amount is then reclaimed from the business automatically 14 working days later. So an invoice can be correctly marked paid in Xero for months before its money goes back.
Payouts and fees in Xero
GoCardless takes its fees before paying out, so each payout is smaller than the invoices inside it. The clearing account absorbs the gap. On payout day, the integration posts the fees to a nominated fee account and transfers the net payout to the current account, where it matches the deposit in the bank feed.
Payments collected outside the integration, from the GoCardless dashboard for instance, aren’t reconciled automatically. Each one is recorded against its invoice by hand, through the same clearing account, and the payout then moves across on its own.
The GoCardless API
The GoCardless API is JSON over HTTPS, with access tokens and a free sandbox that needs no approval. It covers customers, mandates, payments, subscriptions, instalment schedules, refunds and payouts, with Billing Requests handling the sign-up flow. Official libraries cover Ruby, Python, Java, Node.js, PHP, Go and .NET.
Every request can carry an idempotency key, so a retried call never charges a customer twice. Webhooks report each step of a payment’s life, from confirmed and paid out to failed or charged back. They’re signed and retried several times if a delivery fails.
In February 2026, GoCardless added an MCP tool for querying an account through an AI assistant.
Payments the books can trust
GoCardless sits between the customer’s bank and the books, so its events are worth passing on. Each payout can be matched to the payments inside it, a failed payment or late chargeback can flag the invoice and pause the reminders, and a new mandate can update the customer’s record in the CRM.
A payment marked paid in one system and failed in another is a classic sign of disconnected systems. Matching by hand has a cost that’s easy to put a number on, and whatever gets built needs a named owner after launch.