Standing orders are recurring payments, where the donor arranges with their bank to automatically pay you a certain amount each month or year.
Standing orders are quite different to Direct Debits:
Donors can set up, change, and cancel standing orders without having to tell you.
Standing orders are direct bank transfers on a recurring basis. They aren't processed via a payment provider like GoCardless
Beacon makes it easy to keep track of your standing orders by automatically creating expected payments. You can then simply check those payments against your bank statement, amending any details if necessary.
Tip: For new recurring payments, we recommend you encourage donors to pay via Direct Debit or card (Stripe), rather than standing orders. It's much easier to manage, and gives you more control over payment schedules, amounts, and notifications.
Don't import your bank statement!
For standing order payments, we do not recommend using Beacon's CSV import tools to import payments into Beacon.
This is primarily because bank statement exports are usually not particularly well formatted, and don't include useful "identifiers" (e.g. email address) that make it easy to link payments to people and subscriptions within Beacon.
Contents
Check out our video guide, or read our documentation below:
Overview
Initial setup
Fill in a Subscription with:
• Payer
• Amount
• Payment method
• Frequency
• Status: Active
• Next payment date: Future date of the next payment
• Reference (optional)
Tick the 'Auto-create payments?' checkbox
Ongoing
To reconcile Payments;
Filter for 'Paid?' is not checked
You can select each payment as you confirm they were received
Bulk update confirmed payments to mark 'Paid?' as checked
Guide: How to automate your standing orders
Each standing order should exist as a Subscription in Beacon.
Tip: Read this article to learn the difference between subscriptions and payments in Beacon.
On the subscription record, you can ask Beacon to automatically create payments on your behalf, on the date they're expected to come in, by ticking the auto-create payments field. You can also enter the bank statement reference (if any) in the reference field.
Tip: If you can't see these fields, you can make them visible here.
Beacon will automatically create a new payment on the subscription's 'Next payment date', passing over all the relevant info from the subscription to the payment.
Tip: This means that your 'Next payment date' should always be in the future - otherwise that date will never arrive!
Payments
The payment will be created with the 'Paid?' checkbox as unchecked. This is to indicate that the payment is expected, but you haven't confirmed that it's been received yet.
Every month (or more often if you prefer), you can check the payments created automatically by Beacon vs your actual bank statement, and mark each one as paid once confirmed.
To make this easy, we recommend creating a view with the following filters and columns:
You can mark payments as paid one by one, or in bulk.
Subscriptions
Whenever a payment is auto-created for a subscription, Beacon will automatically update the following fields on the subscription record:
First payment date - set to the date of the payment just created (if not already set)
Last payment date - the date of the payment just created
Next payment date - the date of the payment just created, plus 1 month/quarter/year (based on the subscription's frequency)
Tip: The subscription is still active! Another payment will be created on the next payment date.
Passing info from subscriptions to payments
When payments are created, Beacon automatically passes the following data from the subscription record to the payment record:
Amount
Covered fee amount
Payer
Reference
Payment method
Payment type
Source
Gift Aid allowed
Membership
Campaign
Fund
What criteria does Beacon use to auto-create payments?
All of the following criteria must be satisfied for payments to be auto-created:
Auto-create payments - must be checked
Next payment date - must be today/in the future
Status - must be "Active"
Amount - must be set
Frequency - must be set to either "Monthly", "Quarterly", or "Annually"
Frequently asked questions
Wait, so we don't have to create payments in Beacon manually?
Nope! Beacon creates payments on your behalf automatically. You'll still need to mark the payments as paid, but you shouldn't have to create ongoing payments yourself.
Someone set up a standing order last week. What do we need to do?
Create a subscription record. Set the amount, frequency, payment method, first payment date (to the date of the first payment), next payment date (when you're expecting the next payment to come through), auto-create payments (checked), and reference (the bank reference that appears on each payment, if any).
Create a payment record for the first payment that came through from the subscription. (We'll create all future ones for you)
What happens if a payment created by Beacon doesn't match, or doesn't appear on our bank statement?
You might not have been paid! 🙁
Sometimes payments can take a bit of time to come through - we'd recommend leaving the payment as "unpaid" for a couple of weeks to see if the payment comes through.
If the payment doesn't fully match your bank statement (e.g. the amount or payment date is different), you should update it in Beacon to make sure it reflects reality.
If the payment still doesn't appear in your statement, the donor could have cancelled their standing order. You should:
Archive the payment record
Set the subscription status to "cancelled"
Consider giving the donor a call!
I have a different frequency. Will it work?
Beacon only supports monthly, quarterly, and annually for auto-generated payment frequencies (you can add other frequencies to the 'Frequency' field, but they won't work with this system).
However, there are some workarounds:
Biannual - Create two annual subscriptions, and offset the next payment dates by 6 months
Two-monthly - Create a monthly subscription, and archive the created payment on the off months
Eleven-monthly (yes, we've seen it!) - Create a monthly subscription, and archive the created payment on the off month
How are weekends handled?
Standing orders don't usually come out on weekends and public holidays, so Beacon handles this nicely for you.
When a payment is auto-created, dates are updated on the subscription, including the next payment date.
If payment method is set as bank transfer or Direct Debit, and the calculated next payment date is on a weekend or public holiday, the next payment date will be set on the next working day. Here's an example:
Tom Jones is paying you £100 each month via standing order, on the 25th of each month. In December, both 25th and 26th are bank holidays, so Beacon will assume that the next payment date will be 27th December. 25th January is a weekday, so Beacon will set the following next payment date to 25th January.
For other payment methods, such as Direct Debit, the next payment date can fall on the weekends so will always create on the same day of the month.
Should we set "auto-create payments" for recurring payments via Stripe or GoCardless
No.
Stripe and GoCardless automatically notify Beacon when payments are made. When this happens, Beacon will creates payment records in your database to reflect that.
Auto-create payments should only be used for standing orders, and other recurring payments outside of Stripe/GoCardless.
How often does Beacon check if new payments should be created?
Once per hour.