GoCardless Direct Debit integration for CiviCRM

A CiviCRM extension to GoCardless integration to handle UK Direct Debits.

This extension is working well for collecting regular weekly, monthly or yearly donations from UK supporters. Using it you can enable supporters to set up direct debits and every month when GoCardless takes payment this updates your CiviCRM contributions automatically. If someone cancels their Direct Debit this also updates your CiviCRM records. It also sends them a bunch of flowers thanking them for their support and asking them to reconsider their cancellation. Ok, it doesn't do that last bit.

Artful Robot stitches together open source websites and databases to help campaigns, charities, NGOs and other beautifully-minded people change the world. We specialise in CiviCRM and Drupal.

Other things to note

Although "Beta", this has been in production use since November 2016. The usual disclaimers apply :-)
Daily recurring is not supported by GoCardless so you should not enable this option when configuring your forms. If you do users will get an error message: "Error Sorry, we are unable to set up your Direct Debit. Please call us."
Taking one offs is not supported/implemented yet.
Generally worth scanning the titles of the Issue Queue
Developers can drive it from a non-CiviCRM form, e.g. if you have a highly custom donate form that does not use CiviCRM's payment pages.
There are some phpunit tests. You only get these by cloning the repo, not by downloading a release .tgz or .zip. Do not run these on a live database!
Pull Requests (PR) welcome. Please ensure all existing tests run OK before making a PR :-)
You can pay me to fix/implement a feature you need contact me
If you use this, it may help us all if you drop a comment on Issue 20

How to install

Choose option 1a (everyone) or 1b (developers only), then proceed with step 2.

0. Set up a GoCardless account

You'll need at least a sandbox (i.e. testing) account, so register a sandbox account at GoCardless.

From within GoCardless's dashboard you'll need to Create an access token. Once you're logged in at GoCardless, go to Developers » Create » Access Token.

You want to choose Read/Write. Name it whatever you like. Once you've created an access token a pop-up box will display the token. You can never get to this again! So make sure you copy it and store it safely somewhere for later use in your CiviCRM payment processor configuration.

You'll need to come back to the GoCardless control panel later on to set up your webhook.

1a. Install it the Simple way

Visit the Releases page and download the code from there. Unzip it in your extensions directory, then follow instructions for step 2 below.

1b. Install it the Difficult way (developers)

The packaged version of this extension include the GoCardlessPro PHP libraries and exclude some dev-only bits including the bin, cli and tests directories.

This extension requires the GoCardlessPro PHP library. Here's how to install from the *nix command line. You need composer

$ cd /path/to/your/extensions/dir
$ git clone https://github.com/artfulrobot/uk.artfulrobot.civicrm.gocardless.git
$ cd uk.artfulrobot.civicrm.gocardless
$ which composer >/dev/null && composer install || echo You need composer, pls see https://getcomposer.org/download/ Then repeat this command. (i.e. composer install)

That should then bring in the GoCardlessPro dependency and you should be good to go.

2. Install the extension and create a payment processor

Install it through the CiviCRM Extensions screen as usual (you may need to click Refresh).

Set up the payment processor:

go to Administer » CiviContribute » Payment Processors then click Add New
select GoCardless from the Payment Processor Type
give it a name
select GoCardless Direct Debit from the Payment Method
add your access tokens (you obviously need a GoCardless account to do this)
make up unique and secure webhook secrets
click Save.

Note: for testing purposes you may put your test/sandbox credentials (excluding webhook secret - see below) in the Live fields, but you must use CiviCRM's 'test drive' mode for trying payments; live mode will NOT work with test credentials since they are authenticated against different GoCardless API end points. So your live testing will need to be with real-world live data.

3. Install your webhook at GoCardless

GoCardless has full separation of its test (sandbox) and live account management pages, so you'll do this twice. Be sure to supply the webhook secret appropriate to the test/live environments - you must choose a different secret for live/test.

The webhook URL is at:

Drupal: /civicrm/gocardless/webhook
Wordpress /?page=CiviCRM&q=civicrm/gocardless/webhook
Joomla: /index.php?option=com_civicrm&task=civicrm/gocardless/webhook

Note: the webhook will check the key twice; once against the test and once against the live payment processors' webhook secrets. From that information it determines whether it's a test or not. That's one reason you need different secrets.

Note: a webohok is a web page; it's not something for you to view in your browser. i.e. if you enter the webhook URL in your browser you should see a blank page. To find out whether it's working you'll need GoCardless to send it some data.

4. Use it and test it!

Create a contribution page and set up a regular donation using the "test-drive" page. Check things at CiviCRM's end and at GoCardless' end. Note that GoCardless keeps a log of whether webhooks were successful and gives you the chance to resubmit them, too, if I remember correctly.

Note: if you're running a "test-drive" contribution page you can use GoCardless's test bank account: 20-00-00 55779911.

Having set up a Direct Debit you should see that in the Contributions tab for your contact's record on CiviCRM, showing as a recurring payment, and also a pending contribution record. The date will be about a week in the future. Check your database several days after that date (GoCardless only knows something's been successful after the time for problems to be raised has expired, which is several working days) and the contribution should have been completed. Check your record next week/month/year and there should be another contribution automatically created.

Pre-filling fields on the GoCardless hosted page

GoCardless can prepopulate some of the fields (address, phone, email). This is useful in the cases when you have asked the user for this information as part of the form you set up in CiviCRM because it saves them from having to enter it twice.

To use this feature just add the relevant fields to a CiviCRM Profile that you are including in your contribution (etc) page.

Addresses, emails, phones all take a location type (Primary, Billing, Home, Work...). If you have used more than one location type this plugin needs to choose which to send to GoCardless. It picks fields using the following order of preference:

Billing
Primary
anything

Membership Dates

In a simple world, someone fills in a membership form, pays by credit card and their membership is active immediately.

In the DD world, things happen on different dates:

setup_date - fill in a membership form, complete a DD mandate
- Recurring Contribution created with status In Progress
- Contribution created with status Pending
- Membership created with status Pending,
  join_date = start_date = setup_date
charge_date - first payment charged
webhook_date - GoCardless fires webhook and notifies of charge_date
- Contribution updated to status Completed, receive_date updated to charge_date
- Membership updated to status New, join_date unchanged, start_date updated to webhook_date, end_date updated to start_date + membership_length

This appears to be identical date behaviour to creating a membership with a pending cheque payment and then later recording the cheque as being received. The membership will start when the payment is recorded and the contribution status set to Completed. The end date is recalculated to be a year (or other membership length) from the start date so that members get a full year of benefit.

However... some might want the membership to start as soon as the mandate is setup, before waiting for the first payment. The current date logic is handled by core so this extension would need to override that in a couple of places to implement a different scheme. Since that is not specific to this payment processor, it might be better to do this as an enhancement to core, or a separate extension.

Note on setting up memberships.

The "Auto-renew" option is required for the GoCardless payment processor to handle memberships.

If you use Price Sets and you have the "Auto renew option, not required" selected then the user will not be shown the tick-box allowing them to select Auto Renew, and this will break things. So better to use the straight forward auto renew option rather than give an option that will break things.

Technical people might like to know that without this, CiviCRM creates a single contribution and a membership record, but no contribution_recur record. This causes a crash completing the redirect flow because it can't figure out the interval (i.e. 1/year or such). It is possible to look that up from the membership ID however that leads to the situation described above and it's then not clear what happens when the next payment comes in as it will not match up with a contribution_recur record.

Technical notes

GoCardless sends dozens of webhooks and this extension only reacts to the following:

payments: confirmed and failed.
subscriptions: cancelled and finished.

The life-cycle would typically be:

User interacts with a CiviCRM Contribution form to set up regular contribution. On submitting the form the user is redirected to the GoCardless website after the following records are set up in CiviCRM:
- a pending contribution
- an pending recurring contribution
Those records have receive and start date set (by core CiviCRM) to the date and time the form was submitted (as you might expect). However, once the user completes the page(s) on the GoCardless website they are redirected back to your website which completes the set up. On completion, the receive date of the contribution and the start date of the recurring contribution will have been set to a date in the future. This is the date provided by GoCardless itself and corresponds to the earliest date they can make a charge.

Also, the recurring contribution record is now set to In Progress.

The completion process sets up the following at GoCardless:
- a customer
- a mandate
- a subscription - the ID of this begins with SB and is stored in the CiviCRM recurring contribution trxn_id and processor_id fields
- a lot of scheduled payments
GoCardless submits the charge for a payment to the customer's bank and eventually (seems to be 3 working days after submission) this is confirmed. It sends a webhook for resource_type payments, action confirmed. At this point the extension will:
- look up the payment with GoCardless to obtain its subscription ID.
- look up the CiviCRM recurring contribution record in CiviCRM from this subscription ID (which is stored in the transaction ID field)
- find the pending CiviCRM contribution record that belongs to the recurring contribution and update it, setting status to Completed, setting the receive date to the charge date from GoCardless (n.b. this is earlier than the date this payment confirmed webhook fires) and setting the transaction ID to the GoCardless payment ID. It also sets amount to the amount from GoCardless.
- check that the status on the CiviCRM recurring contribution record is 'In Progress'. (It should be but the check is there because we previously did things differently.)

Note: After a while the GoCardless payment status is changed from confirmed to paid_out. Normally the confirmed webhook will have processed the payment before this happens, but the extension will allow processing of payment confirmed webhooks if the payment's status is paid_out too. This can be helpful if there has been a problem with the webhook and you need to replay some.

A week/month/year later GoCardless sends another confirmed payment. This time:
- look up payment, get subscription ID. As before.
- look up recurring contribution record from subscription ID. As before.
- there is no 'pending' contribution now, so a new Completed one is created, copying details from the recurring contribution record.
Any failed payments work like confirmed ones but of course add or update Contributions with status Failed instead of Completed.
The Direct Debit ends with either cancelled or completed. Cancellations can be that the subscription is cancelled, or the mandate is cancelled. The latter would affect all subscriptions. Probably other things too, e.g. delete customer. GoCardless will cancel all pending payments and inform CiviCRM via webhook. GoCardless will then cancel the subscription and inform CiviCRM by webhook. Each of these updates the status of the contribution (payment) or recurring contribution (subscription) records.

Developers: Importing from GoCardless

If you clone from the github repo, you'll see a cli directory. This contains a script I used as a one-off to import some pre-existing GoCardless subscriptions. It's not a fully fledged tool but it may help others with one-off import tasks to build a tool for their own needs from that.

Change log

1.9 For CiviCRM 5.19

(NOT in Beta: No longer refuses to send email receipts (Issue 61))
Supports changing the amount and cancelling a subscription via CiviCRM main user interface (issue 6). It does not support letting supporters themselves change these things.
One-way-upgrade: we now store the GoCardless subscription ID in both trxn_id and processor_id in the civicrm_contribution_recur table. This is because some parts of CiviCRM's UI require us to reference the record via processor_id which was unused up to this point. An upgrade task should populate existing data.
Some membership dates logic was failing in the tests under CiviCRM 5.19. This version passes its tests again.
Fix issue when setting up a weekly membership (issue 59 - thanks to MJW Consulting for reporting and suggesting fix)
Improvements to code standards; better support for translation possiblities; move tests to phpunit6.

1.8 Big changes

Now with pictures showing the lifecycle of Contribution and ContributionRecur records.
Major change, possibly breaking: multiple GoCardless payment processors now allowed. Previous versions had assumed a single GoCardless payment processor, and that's fine for most organisations. However some organisations have cause to use multiple GoCardless accounts with one CiviCRM instance.

This change should hopefully be invisible to you and existing sites should continue to work as before, with the possible exception of anyone who has done a custom (non-CiviCRM Contribution Page) donation form and used the GoCardless classes directly. If you have done this then you need to adjust your code, removing calls to:
1. CRM_GoCardlessUtils::getApi
2. CRM_GoCardlessUtils::getRedirectFlow
3. CRM_GoCardlessUtils::getPaymentProcessor
In cases (1), (2), you should now be looking to find an appropriate CRM_Core_Payment_GoCardless payment processor object (e.g. use
```
// This assumes you only have one active GoCardless processor.
$processor_config = civicrm_api3(
    'PaymentProcessor',
    'getsingle',
    ['payment_processor_type_id' => 'GoCardless',
     'is_active' => 1, 'is_test' => 0]);
$processor = Civi\Payment\System::singleton()->getByProcessor($processor_config);
$redirect_flow = $processor->getRedirectFlow(...);
$gc_api = $processor->getGoCardlessApi();
```
) and call its methods which have the same names. In case (3) please just use CiviCRM's native methods for finding a payment processor.

Currently these methods are left in but will trigger E_USER_DEPRECATED errors to help you find use.
Now handles "Late Failures"

With BACS (and SEPA, although that's not yet suppoorted here) payments can apparently be "Confirmed" one day, then next day they can still fail. This is just to keep you on your toes.

It's called late failure.

Until v1.8 we didn't know about late failures which would result in 'Completed' contributions being recorded which had actually failed the next day.

This new version of the extension handles late failures by changing the Contribution status to Refunded. Note that CiviCRM will not let us change a Completed Contribution to Failed, which is why it's processed as a refund.
Scheduled job for abandoned/failed mandate setups

When a user clicks submit and is redirected to the offsite GoCardless page to enter their bank details, a recurring contribution and a contribution record are created as Pending on their Contact record.

If the user gives up at this point then those records would stay in "Pending", which means you can't then easily differentiate between those abandoned ones and the ones that should complete soon.

v1.8 includes a scheduled job which will look for any Pending recurring contributions older than 24 hours and will mark them as Failed. The Pending Contribution record is marked as Cancelled.

So you can now find abandoned set up attempts by searching for Failed recurring payments.

1.7

Fixed issue in certain use cases that resulted in the First Name field not being pre-populated (#45). Also further thanks to Aidan for knotty discussions on membership.
Fixed issue that caused other payment processors' configuration forms to not save. (#49)

1.6 "stable"!

Membership now supported thanks to work by William Mortada @wmortada and Aidan Saunders @aydun, and this extension is in production use by quite a few organisations so calling this release stable.
GoCardless forms are now pre-filled with address, email, phone numbers if you have collected those details before passing on to GoCardless. Thanks to Vitilgo Society for funding this work.
Updated GoCardlessPro library to 1.7.0 just to keep up-to-date.

1.5beta

Should now respect a limited number of installments. Previous versions will set up an open-ended subscription. You may not have wanted that ;-) Also updated GoCardlessPro library from 1.2.0 to 1.6.0 GoCardlessPro changelog should not have broken anything.

Mepond / uk.artfulrobot.civicrm.gocardless