Direct Debit Advance Notification

Rijusiddha Drewett

Under the UK rules of Direct Debit the donor must be informed of the details of the Direct debit they have signed up to. One of the required fields in this communication must be the Direct Debit Reference.

We have been using OEX to send out the Advance Notice as the thank you email that goes out however we have realised that this required piece of information is missing from our emails.

Having investigated how we do this we have come to a dead end as the reference is not generated until the gift has been processed. So maybe workflows are the answer? No as the merge fields are extremely limited and we cannot pull this field into the email template.

On our old CRM a reference was generated at the time of making the donation on the online form which was then used rather than after the gift processed. The OEX attributes could serve this function but again are not available as merge fields.

We are trying to avoid manual workload and this needs to be automatic. Any ideas out there?

Seems a bit crazy as this is a regulatory requirement that hasn't been picked up by development.

Austen Brown

@Rijusiddha Drewett - You should take a look at Power Automate. There is a possibility that utilizing this connection to RE NXT you could create the “Direct Debit Reference” specifically for these gifts and then generate an email to these specific donors, all from within PA using dynamic data from the database. Check out this blog for more information on this option:

Rijusiddha Drewett

@Austen Brown thanks for that. Of course hadn't considered that. We haven't used it yet so thanks for the link. Will look into it ?