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Tutorial extra

OK, good to have you with us!

GoCardless has a "scenario simulator" on test accounts which is useful for testing your set-up without having to actually wait a week for a payment to be made!

We're going to go on to simulate the payment being successful. Then we'll cancel the mandate.

Simulate the payment having been made

Log in to GoCardless on your sandbox account. Find your Customer, and click into their Payment. The URL and somewhere at the top of the page shows you a payment ID, e.g. PM001122334455. Their IDs are very useful and all begin with letters to let you know their type, e.g. PM... is a payment, SB... is a subscription.

Copy/make a note of the payment ID.

Go back to the Customer page and click on the item that says about Bank Account. On that page you'll see a Mandates section. Click on the mandate and copy/note the mandate ID. Mandate IDs start MD...

Then go to Developers » Simulate a Scenario.

  1. First choose Activate Mandate, and copy in your MD... mandate ID and click Simulate scenario. It should give some sort of confirmation.

  2. Now choose Payment Paid Out. Enter the payment ID (PM...) you copied, and again click Simulate Scenario.

Now what it says is that this will "immediately" simulate these things having happened. But it's not really immediate; you may have to wait 5-10 mins before anything happens.

Take a look at your contact in CiviCRM.

You should now see that the Contribution is Completed, and Viewing that contribution should show you its PM... ID under Transaction ID.

Now let's cancel it.

You can cancel it from GoCardless's site, external to CiviCRM: this should set the Recurring Contribution to Cancelled (and if you cancel before the initial payment is completed, then that would change from Pending → Cancelled, too.)

Or you can cancel from within CiviCRM. Find the Recurring Contribution and click Cancel.

  • Give a reason if you like.

  • Choose Yes to "Send cancellation request to GoCardless" - that's important because if you don't then money will still be taken but won't/might not be registered! (The No option is only there for weird admin troubleshooting.)

You can see from the GoCardless website that this has cancelled the subscription belonging to the customer. (It has not cancelled the customer, nor has it actually cancelled the mandate.)