Whitmore & Co. Accountants
A fictional small practice on closed desktop software — showing the build that works beside a legacy system: mandates and collections through the two platforms with real APIs, the practice software left exactly where it was.
Where the Time Was Going
A fictional business, drawn from a real and common shape — and the payment admin it was carrying.
Whitmore & Co. is a fictional five-person practice of a familiar kind: client work managed in long-serving desktop practice software, the firm’s own books in Xero, and a hundred and twenty retainer clients paying by standing orders the clients themselves had to set up. Standing orders break silently — a client changes bank and the retainer just stops, discovered two months later in a reconciliation. One-off fees went out as invoices and came back as transfers, eventually. A capable team was spending real hours on credit control for predictable, agreed amounts.
- 40% of small accountancy practices spend over an hour every week chasing overdue invoices (GoCardless × FSB survey, 2025)
- 57% sometimes write debts off rather than keep chasing them (same survey) — forfeiting fees that were never in dispute
- Standing orders fail silently: no notification, no retry, just a gap found at month-end across 120 mandates
- Mistyped references meant manual matching of retainer payments that should have reconciled themselves
What We Could Realistically Touch
An honest map of the existing setup — because what a third-party developer can and cannot access decides what should be promised.
Already in Place
- Desktop practice-management software — closed, long-serving, and with no realistic API access for a third party
- Xero for the practice’s own ledger
- A client list, and engagement letters sent by email
What We Worked With
- The practice’s own GoCardless account for Direct Debit — set up in their name, collecting to their account
- Xero’s API for their own ledger — collections reconcile into it automatically
- The client list as a one-off CSV export, used to generate mandate invitations
What Stayed Untouched
- The practice software — we worked beside it, not inside it, and said so from the first meeting
- Client tax and accounts data — never touches the payment layer; references and amounts only
- The protection itself — every mandate carries the Direct Debit Guarantee, from the client’s own bank
Legacy desktop practice software is the classic "no — we can’t integrate with that", and saying it up front is part of the service. The build leans instead on the two systems with real, owner-authorised APIs: GoCardless for collection and Xero for the ledger. A one-off CSV did the rest. The result behaves like a deep integration where it counts, without a single promise the old software could not keep.
From Payment Page to Payment System
The page is the visible part. The build is everything that stops payments needing to be chased, matched and remembered.
- The two-step mandate page with the Direct Debit Guarantee in full (the demo below)
- 120 mandate invitations generated from one CSV export
- Retainers collected monthly; failures retried automatically, then flagged by name
- One-off fees collected against the same mandate, with proper advance notice each time
- Collections reconciled into Xero automatically
- A monthly credit-control summary that replaced the chasing list
A new client has just accepted their engagement letter. Press play to follow the retainer from setup to a flagged failure.
A simulated, user-controlled walkthrough — fictional data and simulated system connections. No real systems are involved and nothing plays until you press play.
Try the Interactive Demo
A working page in the Whitmore & Co. Accountants branding — a fictional brand, running in test mode only.
Set Up Your Monthly Retainer
Authorise a Direct Debit for your accounting retainer. Your bank protects every collection under the Direct Debit Guarantee, and you can cancel at any time.
Demo details: any name, a sort code such as 20-04-12 and any 8-digit account number will work. No real mandate is created.
- 1 Your Details
- 2 Confirm
Confirm Your Mandate
- Payee
- Whitmore & Co. Accountants
- Service
- Monthly accounting retainer
- Amount
- £120.00, collected monthly
- Reference
- WC-0412
- First collection
- Wed 1 July 2026, then the 1st of each month
- Account holder
- —
- Sort code
- —
- Account number
- —
The Direct Debit Guarantee
- This Guarantee is offered by all banks and building societies that accept instructions to pay Direct Debits.
- If there are any changes to the amount, date or frequency of your Direct Debit, Whitmore & Co. Accountants will notify you, normally three working days in advance of your account being debited, or as otherwise agreed.
- If an error is made in the payment of your Direct Debit by Whitmore & Co. Accountants or your bank or building society, you are entitled to a full and immediate refund of the amount paid from your bank or building society.
- You can cancel a Direct Debit at any time by simply contacting your bank or building society. Written confirmation may be required. Please also notify us.
Your Direct Debit Is Set Up
£120.00 will be collected monthly under reference WC-0412, starting Wed 1 July 2026.
Your mandate confirmation has been emailed to you.
Collections settle directly to the practice's own bank account.
Paying a one-off fee invoice instead? Those are settled by a secure card link — this page sets up your retainer only.
Whitmore & Co. Accountants is a fictional brand created for this demonstration — it is not a SettlePay client and no real payments are taken.
The Part the Customer Never Sees
Every payment page comes with the management layer behind it — statuses, reminders and reconciliation that run themselves.
An illustrative view of the payment-management layer — fictional names and statuses, shown to demonstrate the workflow.
What That Adds Up To, Honestly
Quantified from published UK industry figures — and labelled as the model it is, not passed off as a client result.
The weekly chasing hour that 40% of small practices report (GoCardless × FSB, 2025) becomes a glance at a flagged-exceptions list.
57% of small practices sometimes forfeit payment rather than chase it. A failed collection here is flagged the same morning, not discovered at year end.
Direct Debit covered around 70% of the UK’s regular bill payments in 2024 (UK Finance) — clients already trust the rail, and every mandate carries the Guarantee.
How These Figures Are Modelled
- 120 retainer clients previously paying by standing order, with one-off fees invoiced by transfer.
- 40% of small accountancy practices spend over an hour a week chasing overdue invoices; 57% sometimes write debts off rather than chase — GoCardless × FSB survey, 2025 (accountancy subsample n=100).
- 4.9 billion Direct Debits were collected in the UK in 2024, around 70% of regular bill payments — UK Finance, UK Payment Markets 2025.
- Direct Debit also fails far less often than recurring card payments (GoCardless/IDC research) — one reason the retainer uses a mandate rather than a stored card.
Like the business itself, these figures are illustrative: a scenario modelled on published UK industry averages, not measured results from a real client. Your own numbers will depend on your volumes and on how you get paid today.
Now Try It on Your Own Numbers
Drag the sliders to your business. The figures recompute live, costed against the same UK data.
And fewer write-offs: 57% of small practices sometimes forfeit a fee rather than chase it — here a failed collection is flagged the same morning, not found at year end.
A model, not a measured result: cost of an hour of fee-earner time and time-per-item are yours to set, costed against published UK figures. Your own savings depend on your volumes and how you get paid today.
How It Connects
Behind the page, every payment carries its reference — an invoice number, tenancy, lot or mandate — so it is matched back to the business's records automatically, reminders go out on schedule instead of from someone's evening to-do list, and the books update themselves. Funds settle directly from the processor to the business's own bank account; SettlePay never holds funds. Payments are processed by FCA-regulated partners.
What Would This Look Like on Your Numbers?
Tell us how you get paid today — bank transfers, cheques, card numbers over the phone — and what systems you already run. We'll map what we could realistically automate for you, and what it would save.