The aim of this article is to give a brief overview of the features supported by Bluefort TAPP for GoCardless and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance. No technical or programming knowledge is required in order to use this application making it very easy to deploy and configure. Bluefort TAPP is 100% free to use on sandbox and production environments. The standard GoCardless fees apply and we do not charge any custom app fees over and above the standard GoCardless fees.
GoCardless Onboarding
Bluefort TAPP allows you to seamlessly onboard your D365 Finance environment to GoCardless. It automatically generates a URL which you can browse to in order to create a new GoCardless merchant for your organization or login and link to an existing GoCardless merchant to your D365 Finance environment and legal entity (company). The wizard is hosted within GoCardless and allows you to flow through easy and efficient legal onboarding.
Multiple GoCardless Merchants
It is possible to link your D365 Finance environment to multiple GoCardless merchants. You can onboard one GoCardless merchant per legal entity or share one GoCardless merchant account across multiple legal entities.
Direct Debit Mandates
It is possible to capture one or more GoCardless direct debit mandate for a customer and define the default. This means that if you do business multiple times with the same customer and/or on a recurring basis then you do need not to ask for payment information for each and every transaction but you can do this once and keep on using the same bank account linked to that mandate until the mandate expires or is cancelled. When a default mandate is configured for an account, all linked invoices are automatically settled using that mandate bank account. Mandates can be captured as follows:
- Using a customer onboarding URL – this is generated within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales or Customer Service and should then be sent over to the customer e.g. via email, using Microsoft Powe automate, or in a customer portal. When the customer browses the URL they are presented with a modern and intuitive wizard hosted by GoCardless to submit their bank details.
- Manually capturing bank details – Here bank details are captured manually via a portal, a tablet, on paper, etc. The bank details are than submitted to the GoCardless API to create a mandate.
Success+
Any GoCardless payment generated from TAPP can benefit from the artificial intelligence capabilities of GoCardless Success+. Success+ uses payment intelligence to manage and reduce payment failures. Recover, on average, 70% of failed payments. Failed payments are a concern for every business. Customers can unintentionally churn when their payments fail and 11-15% of uncollected funds turn into bad debt. Although not all customers are unwilling to pay, complex and manual collections processes give every customer the same payment recovery experience. Success+ intelligently manages your late payments. Automatically collecting 70% of failed payments on the day best suited to your customers. Creating a smoother experience for them and better cash flow for you.
Manual Retry for Failed Payments
If more control is required on triggering retries for failed payments and thus the merchant is not confident to use AI-enabled success+, then failed payments can be manually retried from within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance. It is only allowed to retry a failed payment for up to three times (this is a limitation from the payment providers).
Instant Bank Payments
For a specific invoice in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales or Customer Service, you can also generate a GoCardless Instant Bank Payment URL for your customer to settle a specific transaction. Cards have expensive transaction fees; bank transfers offer a poor customer experience; bank debit is not optimized for one-off payments. Instant Bank Pay is the GoCardless feature that makes it easy for your customers to pay by bank, using Faster Payments. These instant transfers mean better visibility for both you and your customers, save you time chasing one-off payments, and creating a smoother customer experience.
Transition Instant Bank Pay to Direct Debit
It is possible to set a flag on the customer where you start off with an Instant Bank Payment which, if successful, will automatically transition to a Direct Debit mandate.
Custom Metadata
Out of the box, TAPP appends custom meta data to all GoCardless transactions. Thus, users access the GoCardless portal are easily able to identify the source environment and the specific transaction id (typically customer number for mandates and invoice number for payments) related to the record. This ensures maximum traceability and transparency without the explicit need to login to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.
GoCardless Refunds
Using Bluefort TAPP it is possible to refund any customer payment by creating a credit note to a sales order, free text invoice or project invoice and leaving the GoCardless Direct Debit flag switched on if you would also like to refund the customer via GoCardless, instead of keeping the balance on account.
Chargebacks
Bluefort TAPP can also handle chargebacks. If the Process chargeback function is used, the automatic settlements previously posted against an invoice are all reversed.
Real-time alerts
Email notifications from the GoCardless platform keeps both merchants and customers aware of any failed payments or cancellations, mandate cancellations etc so you’re always notified and up-to-date.
Data reconciliation
It is possible to reconcile data from your GoCardless account down to your D365 Finance environment. The reconciliation for the various data elements is available via the various periodic batch jobs which can be enabled both If enabled for a specific reconciliation type, TAPP ships with out-of-the-box batch jobs which automatically synchronize the data as per your business requirements. You can manually synchronize the data by using the buttons in the various inquiry forms.
Having large datasets within your D365 Finance environments impacts your Microsoft D365 Finance database capacity.
Once reconciled, the data can be reviewed within the Enterprise Automation -> Inquiries and Reports -> GoCardless sub-menu, as shown in the screenshot below.
The out of the box GoCardless data reconciliation types that can be synchronized are:
- GoCardless Mandates
- GoCardless Payments
- GoCardless Payouts
- GoCardless Refunds
- GoCardless Chargebacks
Logging
The GoCardless logs inquiry screen lets you view detailed logs of your environment’s interaction with GoCardless. This could be useful in troubleshooting scenarios.
Automatic Customer and Supplier Settlements
TAPP provides a GoCardless payouts Cockpit. This shows the GoCardless payout data synchronized from the GoCardless service to FSCM. The functionality within the GoCardless cockpit allows you to automatically generate and post customer payment journals to automatically settle invoices which triggered the original GoCardless payments.
It also allows you to automatically create and post a vendor invoice journal and settle via an automatically created vendor payment journal to capture the charges from GoCardless.
Note: if GoCardless does not deduct fees from your payments (because you are on a fixed/tiered subscription) the supplier/vendor side of this side is not applicable for your business.
All the above can be either triggered manually using the buttons available in the cockpit or configure batch jobs to automatically handle the processing.
On the customer side the above process creates and posts customer payment journals which affect the standard Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance modules:
Sales Ledger (AR) – customer payment transactions and settlement of invoices
Cash and Bank Management – bank account transactions
General Ledger – ledger transactions for the above sub-ledger transactions (viewable via Audit trail)
Credit and Collections – Updates customer balances in credit and collections
On the supplier/vendor side the above process creates and posts vendor invoices and vendor payment journals which affect the standard Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance modules:
Purchase Ledger (AP) – vendor invoice and payment transactions and settlement of both
Tax ledger – transactions that arise from posting the vendor invoice
General Ledger – ledger transactions for the above sub-ledger transactions (viewable via Audit trail)
Note: The supplier/vendor side does not post to the Cash and Bank Management module as the GoCardless fees are withheld at source – you don’t make a specifc payment for each fee.
Integration with Credit and Collection Module of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance
It is possible to configure automatic creation of credit and collection cases in Microsoft Dynamics Finance after a number of failed payment retries.
You can synchronise these cases to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales / CE via dual-write to ensure account manager using CE are aware of credit and collection issues.
Integration with standard D365 Finance payment Days
TAPP can be configured to respect Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance Payment days associated on a customer.
Integration with standard D365 Finance Payment Schedules
TAPP can be configured to respect Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance Payment schedules associated to a customer.
Capture full customer balance
It is possible to configure a parameter that when a GoCardless payment creation is triggered, upon posting an invoice, instead of just capturing the value of the invoice as the payment amount, TAPP captures the full customer balance of the customer. The logic only considers payment transactions which have reached their payment retry limit to ensure no transaction is double counted.
If the total payment amount is larger than the maximum payment amount allowed by GoCardless the payment will fail.
It is recommended to turn off Success+ if you intend to use this feature so as to ensure no double counting.
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM/CE/Dataverse
Bluefort TAPP support customer mandate onboarding from a model-driven app within Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE / CRM / Dataverse. This app also comes bundled for free with TAPP Finance.
Existing GoCardless customer mandates migration
For more information please refer to this article.
Existing GoCardless customer payments migration
For more information please refer to this article.