GoCardless bank_account_closed: AC04 and MD07, the account no longer exists

What GoCardless says

The cause is the same in all four rows, bank_account_closed; the code tells the reason apart. Note the third one: besides the mandate, GoCardless cancels the pending payments of that mandate, which will reach you as cancelled payments with the same cause.

Two events for the same fact

An account closure reaches Odoo twice: with the failed payment and with the mandate being cancelled. The connector handles both: the first one to arrive archives the mandate and notifies, and the second one finds it already archived, without repeating the notice. If either does not arrive through the webhook, the scheduled task that asks GoCardless every hour for missed events recovers it, up to 100 per run.

What the connector does

1. Sets the transaction to error with “GoCardless could not collect this payment (bank_account_closed).” and stores the cause.
2. If the invoice was already paid with that collection, cancels the payment in Odoo and the invoice becomes outstanding again.
3. Archives the customer's payment method: bank_account_closed is one of the four causes for which the connector treats the mandate as dead, together with mandate_cancelled, mandate_expired and authorisation_disputed.
4. Writes it on the customer's record: “The GoCardless direct debit mandate of … is no longer usable (bank_account_closed). No further collection can be taken against it. Ask the customer to set up a new mandate.”
5. Creates an activity “GoCardless mandate lost” so that someone deals with it before the next invoice.

The archived mandate stays in Odoo as history, but is no longer offered for collection. The transaction is opened from the invoice, with the “Payment Transaction” button at the top; the transactions menu only appears in developer mode, and does not exist in Odoo 20.

These three texts are written by the connector when applying the event, with nobody in front. The connector writes these texts in English, so in an English-language Odoo they appear exactly as quoted here, whether a user or a scheduled action triggers them: “GoCardless could not collect this payment (bank_account_closed).”, “The GoCardless direct debit mandate of … is no longer usable (bank_account_closed). No further collection can be taken against it. Ask the customer to set up a new mandate.” and “GoCardless mandate lost”.

How to tell whether it is AC04 or MD07

From Odoo you cannot tell. The cause is the same, the connector stores the cause and not the SEPA code, and the customer note and the activity say the same in both cases. You see the code in GoCardless. According to its help centre, the reason for each failure appears in the payment's status timeline, in the Dashboard (“You are able to view the reason for a payment failure in the status timeline of the payment in your GoCardless dashboard.”). In advanced mode, the exact code also goes in the event (details.reason_code), and the Dashboard keeps the deliveries of the last 3 months under Developers > Webhooks, with their content.

If the code is MD07

MD07 is not a technical problem. The account holder has died and the mandate is cancelled. Pending invoices of that customer will not be collected by direct debit, and how to claim them is a matter for your accountant, not the connector. It is prudent to review their scheduled collections and subscriptions in Odoo so that no more are generated. Odoo's note asks for a new mandate in this case too, because it only knows the cause: with MD07, do not ask for one.

What to do with AC04

• Contact the customer: they have a new account, or will have one, and need to sign a mandate with it.
• When they sign, the new mandate will be another payment method in Odoo; the old one stays archived.
• Collect the outstanding invoices with the new mandate.

With our connector

The GoCardless connector for Odoo 17, 18, 19 and 20 does with bank_account_closed what an attentive person would do: marks the collection as failed, reopens the invoice, removes the dead mandate so that nobody uses it again, and leaves a notice with the cause on the customer's record.

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