FreeAgent's own GoCardless integration
FreeAgent has its own integration with GoCardless. DoubleAgent can help here too, explaining any unexplained payments from your customers.
How does it work?
Once you have connected FreeAgent to GoCardless, FreeAgent adds a "GoCardless Account" bank account. Each payment from your customers appears as a credit transaction in this virtual bank account. Any payment for which there is already an invoice in FreeAgent will be automatically explained by FreeAgent. However any payments which do not already have FreeAgent invoices will be left unexplained. (Read more about this.)
This is where DoubleAgent comes in: for each unexplained payment it will find the relevant contact in FreeAgent (creating it if it's a new customer), create a suitable invoice, and explain the payment as settling the invoice. Finally it will have FreeAgent email the invoice to the contact, if you have told DoubleAgent to do so.
What about the payouts?
Whenever GoCardless sends you a payout, it effectively shows up twice in FreeAgent:
- as a credit transaction in your normal bank account;
- as a transfer from your GoCardless bank account to your normal bank account.
Sadly FreeAgent's API is too limited to allow DoubleAgent to explain the payouts for you. You have to explain them the way you would without DoubleAgent: click on the (unexplained) credit transaction in your normal bank account, click "More Options", and then choose "Use an Existing Manual Entry" – the transfer – to explain it. You can read more in How to match a manual entry to an imported bank transaction.
If I have set up a GoCardless integration in FreeAgent, should I also set up a GoCardless integration in DoubleAgent?
If you always create an invoice in FreeAgent before taking a customer payment in GoCardless, there is no benefit in setting up a GoCardless integration in DoubleAgent.
However if you take even one customer payment in GoCardless without already having an invoice in FreeAgent – perhaps follow-up payments after an initial one – then you will save yourself a lot of fiddly work by setting up a GoCardless integration in DoubleAgent.
