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We have a recurring confusion whereby customers create a Direct Debit mandate while they have one or more invoices that haven't yet been paid, and then assume that these invoices will get paid by Direct Debit. This doesn't happen since we only charge invoices by Direct Debit if a DD mandate exists at the time they are raised.

This results in late payment reminder emails being sent, but still some customers either assume that the payments will go through by DD, or just don't see the reminder emails.

Any time a service's payments get late enough to be shut down for non-payment we do try to check for confusions like this, but sometimes we forget or the customer doesn't respond to those forms of contact either, and we end up interrupting the customer's service. Also once things have got to this stage it has used a lot of human time, which is best to avoid.

It would be good to avoid this whole confusion, so we've discussed this on the "users" mailing list before:

https://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20200907.223818.82a60273.en.html

The rough consensus seems to be that, at the time when the Direct Debit mandate is created by the customer, if there are any unpaid invoices then there should be an interstitial (not-ignoreable) prompt along the lines of "Pay outstanding invoices totalling £x.y now by Direct Debit? [Yes] / No". It will default to "Yes".