Getting paid is one job, and the UK market still often sells it as two. You have a direct debit provider to take the money, and something else to chase the invoices that aren't on a mandate. The split isn't there because it's more efficient. It's there because collecting money over Bacs needs a bank's permission and a scheme membership, while sending a reminder needs neither, so the two categories grew up in different places and never quite met.
In this article
The short version
- Collecting by direct debit needs a sponsoring bank, a Service User Number and the capacity to indemnify that bank, so the category grew out of banking.
- Chasing grew out of accounting and email software, where nobody has to approve you before you can send a reminder.
- The Bacs rulebook and Service User's Guide are behind a login for registered service users, so even the knowledge is gated.
- Advices about cancelled mandates and returned collections reach whoever holds the mandate, and that's rarely the tool doing your chasing.
- Running both leaves you doing the join by hand, usually in a spreadsheet, usually at month end.
Two products with two different parents
Direct debit in the UK is a scheme. Bacs describes a direct debit as "an instruction from a customer to their payment service provider authorising an organisation to collect varying amounts from their account, as long as the customer has been given advance notice of the collection amounts and dates". Every part of that sentence implies a rulebook, a membership and a sponsor, and the companies that built products around it are companies that could get a bank to say yes.
Credit control software came from the opposite direction. It grew out of your accounting ledger and your email, so the entry requirement was an integration and a template library. Anyone could build one.
Those two origins produced two commercial shapes. Collection is priced per transaction, because the provider only earns when money moves. Chasing is priced as a subscription, because the provider's cost is software and not payment volume. You end up paying on both models for one outcome, and your two contracts renew on different dates with different owners inside your business.
What it takes to collect
Before anything else, this is the part where the public record thins out. The Bacs "Direct Debit and Bacs Direct Credit Guide and Rules" and the Service User's Guide sit behind password-protected microsites for registered service users, so almost everything stated online about how the scheme works is a provider's account of a document you can't read. That includes most of what follows, and we've flagged it as we go.
What providers publish about getting your own Service User Number gives you the shape of the barrier. GoCardless describes it as a six digit unique identifier issued to every service user, and says of the bank application that "typically, banks will refuse your request unless you have revenues >£1m. (For some banks this can be £10m.)", that banks "will probably ask for personal guarantees and a bond of £50-500k", and that "the application will generally take 4-12 weeks". London & Zurich, describing the same process, says "the approval process can take between 2 to 10 weeks" and lists among the requirements "contractual capacity to indemnify the sponsor bank against any refunds under the Direct Debit Guarantee". GoCardless elsewhere puts the full direct route at 3 to 6 months.
Three providers, three answers, and no scheme page you can check any of them against. Take the disagreement itself as the answer, and be wary of any page quoting one of those figures as though it were settled.
The workaround the market invented, and the one you're most likely to be using, is the bureau. London & Zurich describes a bureau as "a third party that takes charge of handling Direct Debit payments on your behalf", which "sets up a SUN for each of its merchants but will own each of these SUNs itself". So most businesses collect under somebody else's scheme membership, and that somebody is a payments company rather than a credit control company.
Why chasing had no gate in front of it
Nothing stands between you and a payment reminder. No sponsor, no indemnity, no bond, no six digit identifier. If you can read your sales ledger and send an email, you can run credit control, and that's why the category filled up with tools that connect to your accounting software and do a good job of the messaging.
It also explains what those tools can't do at the end. A chasing product can tell your customer they owe you £2,400 and give them somewhere to pay, but it can't take the money out of their account on the 5th, because taking money is the bit that needed a bank's permission. So the product stops one step short of the outcome you actually wanted, and hands the last step back to you.
What the split costs you
The cost isn't the second subscription, though you're paying that too. Most of it goes on keeping two systems agreeing with each other about the same customer.
- Two records of who owes what. Your collection provider knows about mandates and collection dates. Your chasing tool knows about invoices and reminders. Neither holds the whole picture, so somebody reconciles them.
- The mandate gets signed in the wrong place. A client is most willing to authorise a direct debit at the moment they agree to the work, and that moment usually happens in your proposal or engagement flow, not inside a payments dashboard you'll log into next week.
- Reminders that contradict your collections. A chasing tool with no view of the mandate can email a customer about an invoice that's already scheduled to collect on Friday.
- Reconciliation stays manual. Payments arrive in one system, invoices live in another, and the matching of underpayments, overpayments and missing references lands on a person.
- Reporting splits in half. Your collection rate is in one tool and your chasing activity in the other, so questions about which customers actually need attention take an export to answer.
None of that is dramatic on any given day. It's a steady tax on the same finance person, and the Small Business Commissioner's research puts the time businesses affected by late payment spend chasing at 86 hours a year.
The moment it hurts: a failed collection
Watch what happens when one of your collections fails, because the split is at its most awkward there.
The advices go to the service user. Bacs describes ADDACS as "the Bacs service allowing PSPs to advise Direct Debit service users of any amendments to or cancellations of Direct Debit Instructions", and ARUDD as "the service allowing PSPs to return Direct Debit payments to the service user that they could not apply". Both land with whoever holds the mandate.
Your chasing tool, meanwhile, is looking at your accounting ledger. It sees an invoice that hasn't been marked paid, with no idea that a mandate was cancelled at the bank three days ago, and no idea whether this is a customer with an empty account or a customer who never had a valid instruction in the first place. So it sends the same reminder it would send anyone.
That gap has a measurable shadow in collection data. Invoices set to collect automatically are paid 98.0% of the time with 0.9% going overdue, against 90.8% paid and 5.3% overdue where the money is collected on demand (Adfin platform data, requests created in the seven months to the end of January 2026). Automatic collection usually means a mandate is already in place, though, so the gap reflects the mandate as much as the automation. What it does tell you is where your attention is worth spending, and a business running collection and chasing separately finds that out slowly.
What a joined-up version looks like
The market is closing the gap from both ends. Collection providers have started adding reminders, and chasing tools have started partnering for payments. GoCardless, the most established name in UK bank debit, remains bank debit only and doesn't handle cards, so a failed collection still has to go somewhere else to be rescued.
If you're evaluating anything in this space, the questions that separate a genuinely joined product from two products with a shared login are worth asking directly. Does a cancelled mandate change what your customer is sent next? Can a failed direct debit be collected another way without anyone rekeying it? Does the invoice, the mandate and the reminder history live in one record? Can a client sign the mandate at the point they agree to the work?
Adfin's position is that these belong in one place: invoicing, direct debit, cards and open banking, the chasing, and the reconciliation back to Xero or QuickBooks, with retries free and a failed direct debit able to fall back to card. Whether you buy that from us or assemble it yourself, the join has to happen somewhere, and at the moment most businesses are doing it manually.
Common questions
Why can't a credit control tool take the payment itself? Collecting by direct debit needs a sponsoring bank, a Service User Number and the capacity to indemnify that bank against refunds under the Guarantee. Most chasing tools were built as software on top of your ledger, so they hand the last step back to you or partner with a payments provider.
Do I need my own Service User Number? Not usually. Most businesses collect under a provider's scheme membership. London & Zurich describes a bureau as a third party that "sets up a SUN for each of its merchants but will own each of these SUNs itself".
How long does it take to get direct debit access? Providers disagree. GoCardless quotes 4-12 weeks for a bank application and 3 to 6 months for the full direct route, while London & Zurich says 2 to 10 weeks. No scheme page publishes a figure you can check these against.
What actually breaks when collection and chasing are separate? Mostly the handover after a failure. Cancellation and return advices reach whoever holds the mandate, so a chasing tool reading your ledger can send a routine reminder to someone whose mandate was cancelled at the bank days earlier.
Is it cheaper to buy them separately? Rarely, once you count both contracts and the time spent reconciling them. Collection is priced per transaction and chasing as a monthly subscription, so you're paying on two models for one outcome.
Is the market merging the two? It's moving that way from both directions, though most products still lead with one and bolt on the other. The test is whether an event in the payment side changes what your customer is sent next.
Sources
- Bacs — Direct Debit scheme (accurate as of August 2026)
- Bacs — glossary (accurate as of August 2026)
- Small Business Commissioner — late payments research (accurate as of August 2026)
This article describes how the UK direct debit and credit control markets are structured and is not legal or financial advice. Provider requirements and timescales are quoted from published provider pages and should be verified before you rely on them. Last updated August 2026.
