September update — Partnership with GoCardless

1. What is GoCardless?

GoCardless is a UK payments company specialising in bank-to-bank payments. They're FCA-regulated, ISO 27001-certified and fully GDPR-compliant, with thousands of UK organisations on the platform — from local charities and community groups through to household-name subscription businesses.

They handle the boring bits: setting up the mandate, talking to the customer's bank, collecting the money on the right day, and telling us when it's landed. We handle everything else inside LemonBooking — the invoice, the reconciliation, the receipt to the customer.

2. Key benefits

• Faster Payments & daily payouts — money lands in your account quickly, with payouts run daily.
• Exact amount, exact reference — no rounding, no "thanks Susan" memos.
• Automatic invoice matching — payments sync straight to the right invoice inside LemonBooking.
• Full or partial refunds without storing the customer's bank details anywhere.
• Direct Debit mandates for recurring customers — collect future invoices automatically with no chasing.

3. The honest fee comparison

No single processor is cheapest for every transaction. Here's how the three options compare across the kind of payments a community venue actually takes:

4. A note for councils

If you're a town, parish or district council using a .gov.uk email, take a look at GOV.UK Pay before signing up to a commercial processor. It's the government's own payment platform, free to use for eligible public-sector bodies, and on many transaction profiles it's cheaper than anything commercial.

LemonBooking works with GOV.UK Pay too — speak to us if you'd like to wire that up.

5. Refunds without stored bank details

If you've ever had to refund a cash or BACS payment, you'll know the routine: dig out the customer's bank details, type them into your banking app, double-check the sort code, hope you typed it right. With GoCardless, none of that exists.

Because the original payment came in over the bank rail, the refund goes back the same way — LemonBooking sends a refund instruction to GoCardless, GoCardless pushes the money back to the same account it came from, full or partial. No bank details to store, no copy-paste, no risk of fat-fingering an account number.

6. How to take advantage

Head to Settings → Payment providers and click Connect GoCardless. You'll be bounced over to GoCardless to sign in (or create a free account if you don't have one), and we'll take care of the rest.

Once you're connected, every invoice you raise gets a "Pay by bank transfer" option alongside the usual card options, and any customer with a Direct Debit mandate is collected automatically when their next invoice falls due.