Set up payments and collect from your members

This tutorial takes a syndicate from no payment account to its first money collected. By the end you’ll have a connected payment account, at least one member on a Direct Debit mandate, a collection schedule running, and a payment-history view that tells you what landed and what didn’t. Each step links out to the matching how-to for the detail, so here you get the shape of the whole flow rather than every field.

Money lands directly in your syndicate’s own connected account (Syndik8 never holds it). Your syndicate is the merchant: it owns its refunds and disputes, and a small platform fee (0.5% by default) is taken from the syndicate side, so the member always pays the face amount. If you want the reasoning behind that arrangement before you start, read how payments work first.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, three things should be true:

• You’re an admin of the syndicate. Members can’t connect a payment account or set up collections.
• You have your syndicate’s business details to hand, whether you’re connecting as a company or as an individual / sole trader. The company path needs company information, the representative, the owners or directors, bank details, and identity documents.
• At least one member has an outstanding balance, so your first collection has something to pull. If everyone is square, finalise a month first: see Finalise your first month.

Step 1: Connect the payment account

Open the syndicate, go to the Admin tab, tap Payments, then Provider, and start the connection wizard. Choose your business type (a company, or an individual / sole trader) and work through the pages the wizard shows you. The company path collects company information, the representative, the owners or directors, bank details, an agreement, and identity documents.

The last stretch of identity verification finishes on the payment provider’s own hosted pages. Complete those, and you come back to Syndik8.

Verification cue: the Payments & Schemes screen shows the account as Connected. Card and Direct Debit can switch on at different times, so don’t worry if one capability is live before the other; you only need Direct Debit for the collection steps below.

For the full walkthrough of each wizard page, follow Connect your syndicate’s payment account.

Step 2: Set a collection schedule

With the account ready, open the admin Payments hub and go to the Direct Debit settings. A schedule is two values: an interval (for example, 1 month) and a next collection date. Set both and save.

A daily runner then picks up the schedule whenever its next collection date is today or earlier. It collects whatever each member with an active mandate owes, skips anyone with nothing outstanding, and advances the date by your interval. To pause later, push the next date forward; to stop entirely, use Stop scheduled collection.

Verification cue: the Direct Debit settings show your interval and the next collection date you set.

Setting the schedule before members have mandates is fine; the runner simply has no one to collect from yet, and starts pulling as members come online. The detail lives in Set up Direct Debit collection.

Step 3: Get members paying

Members can pay in two ways, and you can mix them.

Direct Debit (recurring). This is what the schedule in step 2 collects. A member sets up a mandate once. The payment provider emails them a consent and signature link; once they sign, the mandate is active. To nudge a member, open their detail dialog and tap Prompt to set up Direct Debit, which sends them an in-app notification, a push, and an email that deep-links straight to setup. There’s no one-click prompt for everyone, so prompt members one at a time. Members can also set themselves up, with no prompt, from the Set up Direct Debit card on their own My Balance screen.

Tell members two things up front. First, a Direct Debit appears as “Stripe” on their bank statement, so it isn’t a surprise. Second, before each collection they get an advance notice: the provider sends the legal advance-notice email about two working days before the debit, and Syndik8 also shows an in-app “debit incoming” notice, with the collection dated about two London working days ahead.

Card (one-off). A member who’d rather pay a balance off there and then can. From their My Balance screen they tap Pay to clear one charge or Pay All to clear everything, and complete it in the native payment sheet on mobile or a hosted checkout on the web. Card payments are one-off; they don’t create a recurring mandate.

Verification cue: a prompted member receives the notification and email, and once they’ve signed, their mandate reads active.

The member-side steps and screenshots are in Set up a Direct Debit mandate.

Step 4: Watch the first collection land

You don’t have to wait for the scheduled date to see this work. On the Direct Debit settings, Collect now previews what each member owes (name, number of charges, total) and collects on confirm. Use it for your first run so you can watch the cycle through.

Each member with an active mandate and an outstanding balance gets an advance notice, and the collection is dated about two London working days ahead. If a collection fails, the member and the admins are notified, the charges are released, and they’re retried on the next run. A member can reclaim any collection under the Direct Debit Guarantee, which is an indemnity handled through the reversals flow.

Verification cue: the prompted members have advance notices, and a few working days on, their settlements move from in progress to succeeded.

How Collect now, the schedule, pausing, and failures behave in full is covered in Set up Direct Debit collection.

Step 5: Read the payment history

Members see their own record on their My Balance screen: the app-bar history icon opens Payment History, a list of their settlements (each payment or collection) with a status of Pending, In progress, Succeeded, or Failed. This view is online-only and always reflects the authoritative server state, so it’s the place to point a member who asks “did my payment go through?”.

Verification cue: open Payment History on a member who has paid, and the matching settlement reads Succeeded.

What you just did

• Connected the syndicate’s payment account and got it to ready.
• Set a collection schedule that runs daily and collects what’s outstanding.
• Got members paying, recurring by Direct Debit or one-off by card.
• Ran a first collection with Collect now and saw the advance notices go out.
• Confirmed the result in each member’s Payment History.

Where to go next

• The reasoning behind the direct-charge model, the platform fee, and who owns refunds: how payments work.
• Each step in full: Connect your syndicate’s payment account, Set up a Direct Debit mandate, and Set up Direct Debit collection.
• A contested or failed collection: the reversals flow handles indemnity claims under the Direct Debit Guarantee.