GoCardless API
62
AI ReadinessAI-Aware (B-)62/100
Agent-ready OpenAPI document · curated by JenticPaymentsBilling Subscriptionsbearer63 EndpointsREST
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For Agents
Collect direct debit payments, manage mandates and subscriptions, and reconcile payouts across major bank debit schemes. Designed for recurring billing automation.
Use for: I need to collect a recurring direct debit payment from a UK customer, Set up a SEPA mandate for a new subscriber, Cancel a customer's GoCardless subscription, Issue a refund for a settled GoCardless payment
Not supported: Does not handle card payments, digital wallets, or accounting and tax filing - use for bank-debit payment collection and reconciliation only.
Jentic publishes the only available OpenAPI specification for GoCardless API, keeping it validated and agent-ready. The GoCardless API powers recurring payment collection via bank debit schemes including Bacs (UK), SEPA (Eurozone), ACH (US), BECS (Australia), Autogiro (Sweden), and PAD (Canada). It exposes customers, customer bank accounts, mandates, payments, subscriptions, payouts, refunds, events, redirect flows, billing requests, and webhooks. It is the standard interface for SaaS billing, membership organisations, and any business that wants to charge customers directly from their bank account on a recurring basis.
Install Jentic One Beta
Connect the GoCardless API to your agent
Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the GoCardless API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.
Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.
1
Step 1: Jentic One Host machine
# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fgocardless.com%2Fgocardless" | sh2
Step 2: Agent machine
# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fgocardless.com%2Fgocardless" | sh
jentic register # connects your agent to your Jentic One instanceJentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.
Capabilities
What an agent can do with GoCardless API.
Create a customer and attach a customer bank account before setting up a mandate
Authorise a mandate via redirect flow or billing request and reuse it for ongoing collection
Charge a one-off payment against an existing mandate and check its settlement status
Schedule a recurring subscription and pause, resume, or cancel it without re-authorising the mandate
Issue a refund against a settled payment and track refund completion
Reconcile payouts to the merchant bank account with the underlying payments and refunds via payout items
Use Cases
Patterns agents use GoCardless API for, with concrete tasks.
★ SaaS Subscription Billing
A SaaS company collects monthly subscription fees by direct debit. The integration creates a customer, walks the user through a redirect flow or billing request to authorise a mandate, then schedules a subscription against that mandate via /subscriptions. Failed payments surface through /events, and the system can pause, resume, or cancel the subscription without re-authorising the mandate.
Create a monthly subscription for customer 'CU12345' against mandate 'MD789' for £29 starting on the 1st of next month.
One-Off Invoice Collection
Membership and professional services firms use GoCardless to collect one-off invoices once a mandate is in place. POST /payments charges a specific amount against a mandate and the payment lifecycle (pending, submitted, confirmed, paid_out, failed) is observable via /events for accounting reconciliation.
Create a £450 payment against mandate 'MD789' with description 'Invoice 2026-04-118' and poll /events until it reaches paid_out.
Payout Reconciliation
Finance teams reconcile GoCardless payouts against their bank statements by pulling /payouts and the matching /payout_items. Each payout item links a settled payment, refund, or charge back to a specific payout, so accounting systems can trace every line on the bank statement.
List all payouts in May 2026 and pull the payout_items for each so finance can map them to the merchant bank deposits.
AI Agent Billing Operations
A finance AI agent uses Jentic to automate dunning and refund operations. It listens to GoCardless webhooks, retrieves failed payment events, and either retries the payment or cancels the subscription based on policy - all without holding the GoCardless access token in its prompt.
Search Jentic for 'retry failed gocardless payment', load the schema, and retry every payment that failed in the last 24 hours.
Key Endpoints
63 endpoints — jentic publishes the only available openapi specification for gocardless api, keeping it validated and agent-ready.
METHOD
PATH
DESCRIPTION
POST
/customers
Create a new customer record
POST
/mandates
Create a mandate against a customer bank account
POST
/payments
Collect a one-off payment against a mandate
POST
/payments/{identity}/actions/retry
Retry a failed payment
POST
/subscriptions
Schedule a recurring subscription
POST
/subscriptions/{identity}/actions/cancel
Cancel a subscription
POST
/refunds
Issue a refund against a settled payment
GET
/payout_items
List the items inside a payout
POST
/customers
Create a new customer record
POST
/mandates
Create a mandate against a customer bank account
POST
/payments
Collect a one-off payment against a mandate
POST
/payments/{identity}/actions/retry
Retry a failed payment
POST
/subscriptions
Schedule a recurring subscription
POST
/subscriptions/{identity}/actions/cancel
Cancel a subscription
POST
/refunds
Issue a refund against a settled payment
GET
/payout_items
List the items inside a payout
Jentic AI Readiness Score
This API is usable in Jentic One now. Its AI-readiness score against Jentic's framework shows where it stands today and where improvements would make it even easier for agents to use.
G
GoCardless API
- AI-Aware (B-)62/100
99
Foundational Compliance63
Developer Experience & Jentic Compatibility42
AI-Readiness & Agent Experience92
Agent Usability60
Security59
AI DiscoverabilityPowered by JenticScoring Framework 1.0.0 | Scoring Engine 0.4.0
Show dimension breakdown
99
Foundational Compliance
Base layer of spec validity and structural soundness.
Grade: A+Signals: 4
97%
Lint Results
Aggregated quality score from linter diagnostics, weighted by severity.
100%
Resolution Completeness
Percentage of `$ref` references that resolve successfully.
100%
Specification Validity
Checks whether the API description parses successfully and conforms to its declared specification (e.g., OpenAPI).
100%
Structural Integrity
Structural correctness score based on schema issues using logarithmic dampening.
63
Developer Experience & Jentic Compatibility
Clarity, completeness, and ingestion readiness for developers and tooling.
Grade: B-Signals: 4
0%
Example Density
How richly the API is illustrated with examples.
100%
Example Validity
Percentage of examples that conform to their schemas.
50%
Response Coverage
Percentage of operations with complete response definitions (success, client error, server error).
100%
Tooling Readiness
Health of API ingestion, bundling, and resolution within Jentic pipelines.
42
AI-Readiness & Agent Experience
Semantic breadth, depth, and agent comprehension for AI systems.
Grade: D-Signals: 4
10%
Description Coverage
Coverage of descriptions across API elements.
0%
Error Standardization
Coverage of RFC 9457 Problem Details for error responses.
100%
OperationId Quality
Coverage, uniqueness, and casing consistency of operationIds for AI inference.
59%
Summary Coverage
Coverage of summaries across operations/tags/info.
92
Agent Usability
Functional utility, complexity comfort, and AI orchestration readiness.
Grade: A+Signals: 1
92%
Complexity Comfort
Agent comfort level based on API operational and structural complexity.
60
Security
Trust, risk posture, and security compliance.
Grade: B-Signals: 1
60%
Authentication Strength
Average quality of security schemes based on authentication method strength (weakest link for OAuth2).
59
AI Discoverability
Findability, semantic richness, and reasoning readiness.
Grade: C+Signals: 1
59%
Descriptive Richness
Clarity and depth of descriptions across API elements.
Score it yourself
Every API in the directory is allowlisted, so you can re-score it with no key required.
npx @jentic/api-scorecard-cli score <openapi-url>Why Jentic?
What agents get from Jentic-routed access to this vendor.
Setup
Wiring GoCardless by hand means implementing its bearer token auth against api.gocardless.com, managing idempotency and the retry actions on payments and subscriptions, and mapping the customer, mandate, and payment lifecycle yourself. Through Jentic you install once, import GoCardless from the API Directory, store the token once, and your agent calls it.
Permission scoping
GoCardless creates customers, mandates, and payments through top-level POST bodies rather than a resource in the URL path, so scope the agent to the operations it needs, such as creating a payment or reading payout items. You choose the operations it may call, so destructive ones like cancelling a subscription or a mandate are not included unless you add them.
Credential isolation
Your GoCardless token is stored once, encrypted, by your own Jentic One instance and injected at execution time. It never enters the agent's prompt, logs, or context.
Intent-based discovery
Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'collect a direct debit' or 'retry a failed payment', and Jentic returns the matching GoCardless operation with its input schema so the agent calls the right endpoint without browsing the reference docs.
Related APIs
Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.
Alternative
Stripe API
Stripe collects card and ACH debits with broader global card coverage but higher per-transaction fees on bank debits.
Choose Stripe when card acceptance and global coverage matter; choose GoCardless for low-cost recurring bank debits in the UK, EU, US, AU, and CA.
FAQs
Specific to using GoCardless API through Jentic.
Why is there no official OpenAPI spec for GoCardless API?
GoCardless publishes detailed reference documentation but does not ship a maintained OpenAPI specification. Jentic generates and maintains this spec so AI agents and developers can call GoCardless API via structured tooling. It is validated against the live API and kept up to date. Get started with Jentic One, the self-hosted execution layer.
What authentication does the GoCardless API use?
GoCardless uses HTTP bearer token authentication. Live and sandbox tokens are issued from the GoCardless dashboard. Through Jentic, the access token is stored encrypted in the vault and never enters the agent context.
Can I cancel a subscription with the GoCardless API?
Yes. POST /subscriptions/{identity}/actions/cancel cancels a subscription so no further payments are scheduled. The underlying mandate stays active so the customer can be re-subscribed without a new authorisation.
What are the rate limits for the GoCardless API?
The OpenAPI spec does not declare numeric rate limits. GoCardless publishes per-account limits in its developer documentation; in practice, paginate list endpoints and back off on HTTP 429 responses.
How do I retry a failed direct debit payment through Jentic?
Run a Jentic search for 'retry gocardless payment', load the schema for POST /payments/{identity}/actions/retry, and execute it with the payment ID. Install with pip install jentic and chain search, load, and execute.
Does the GoCardless API support refunds?
Yes. POST /refunds creates a refund against a settled payment, and GET /refunds/{identity} returns its status. Refunds settle through the payout cycle and appear as line items on the next /payout_items response.
Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the GoCardless API?
Yes. Because Jentic One is self-hosted, you decide which GoCardless operations your agent may call, so you can grant only what a task needs, such as creating a payment against a mandate or reading payout items. Since GoCardless acts on customers, mandates, and payments through top-level POST bodies rather than a resource in the URL path, destructive operations like cancelling a subscription or a mandate are excluded unless you explicitly add them. Your GoCardless token stays with your own instance and is injected at execution time, so the agent never sees the credential or any operation you did not allow.
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