Understanding mandate statuses

When a borrower sets up a direct debit mandate on your platform, that mandate does not become usable for collections immediately. It moves through a series of statuses before Lendsqr can use it to collect repayments. Each status tells you exactly where the mandate stands and what your team or the borrower needs to do next.

Knowing what these statuses mean helps you resolve collection delays faster, reduce failed repayments, and give borrowers clear answers when they contact your support team.

This guide explains what each mandate status on the admin console means and what action to take when you see it.

What is a direct debit mandate?

A direct debit mandate is a borrower’s formal authorization for your platform to debit their bank account for loan repayments. Once it becomes usable, Lendsqr uses it to collect scheduled repayments without requiring the borrower to initiate each payment manually.

For the mandate to work, it must first complete an activation process. During activation, Lendsqr verifies that the borrower’s account can support debits. To understand the full mandate lifecycle from creation to activation, see Creating a direct debit mandate.

The mandate statuses on Lendsqr

The Direct Debits page groups mandates into three summary counts: Successful, Pending, and Cancelled. Within these, an individual mandate’s status column can show a more specific label. The most common ones are described below.

Pending mandate activation

A mandate shows pending mandate activation after it is created but before Lendsqr has confirmed the borrower’s account can support automatic debits. The system attempts a small activation charge to verify this, shown as the ACTIVATION FEE on the mandate’s detail page. The system continues attempting activation until it succeeds. Each attempt generates a transaction record you can review for a failure reason.

What this means for repayment collection: a pending mandate is not yet usable. Lendsqr cannot use it to collect loan repayments. If a repayment date falls while the mandate is still pending, the system will not attempt a debit through it.

What to do: open the mandate’s transaction history for the failure reason on any failed activation attempt. Common causes include the borrower placing restrictions on their account, or the account having insufficient funds to cover the activation charge.

Active and Successful

A mandate reaches Active or Successful status once Lendsqr completes the activation process. Both indicate the mandate is usable; a mandate in either state may show a Trigger debit action, and some also show Cancel, in the mandate’s Actions menu, depending on the mandate.

What this means for repayment collection: Lendsqr can use this mandate to debit the borrower’s account on scheduled repayment dates.

What to do: no action is required. To confirm a mandate’s status from the admin console, see Status of a mandate: how to confirm from the admin console.

Cancelled

A mandate enters cancelled status when a team member on the Lendsqr admin console explicitly cancels it, using the Cancel action from the mandate’s Actions menu. Borrowers cannot cancel mandates themselves from the web app.

What this means for repayment collection: a cancelled mandate is permanently inactive. Lendsqr will not attempt any further debits through it. The borrower must create and activate a new mandate before automatic collections can resume.

What to do: if the cancellation was intentional, set up a replacement mandate if repayments need to continue. If it was made in error, the borrower must go through the full setup process again. See Creating a direct debit mandate for the setup steps.

For lenders who want to add an approval step before a team member can cancel a mandate, see How to add approval workflows to direct debit mandate cancellations.

A correction: deactivation is not currently reversible

Some mandates carry a Deactivate action instead of Cancel in their Actions menu. This was previously documented on this site as a reversible pause: deactivate to stop collections temporarily, then reactivate later to resume them.

That reactivation step was tested live and could not be reproduced. Confirming Deactivate changes the mandate’s status to Successful and reduces its Actions menu to only Trigger debit. No Activate button or other path back to Active appears anywhere in the admin console afterward. Until this is confirmed fixed, treat Deactivate as effectively permanent, the same as Cancel. See How to deactivate a direct debit mandate for the full detail on what was tested.

Practical scenarios showing how mandate statuses affect your operations

Scenario 1: A borrower’s repayment date arrives but no debit occurs

You check the borrower’s mandate and find it is still pending mandate activation. Lendsqr cannot collect through a pending mandate. You open the mandate’s transaction history and find a failed activation attempt with a decline reason from the bank.

You contact the borrower, they resolve the issue with their bank, and the next activation attempt succeeds. The mandate becomes usable. For future repayment dates, Lendsqr collects automatically. In the meantime, you can record the missed repayment manually if the borrower pays through another channel. See Recording loan repayment from external sources.

Scenario 2: A borrower says they completed the mandate setup, but collections are not running

You check the mandate and find it shows Active or Successful. Lendsqr activated it correctly. The issue lies elsewhere, perhaps in the repayment schedule attached to it. See Steps on how to edit a mandate schedule easily and How to trigger debits on a mandate for next steps.

Scenario 3: A borrower contacts your team after a team member cancels their mandate

The mandate now shows cancelled. Collections through it have stopped permanently. You explain to the borrower that they need to create a new mandate, and guide them through the setup process. Once the new mandate completes activation, collections resume on the next scheduled date. To require mandate creation as part of onboarding so this does not happen to new borrowers, see How to require direct debit mandate creation during user onboarding.

Learn more

To go deeper on mandate management and direct debit collections, read Creating a direct debit mandate for a full overview of setting up a mandate. How to deactivate a direct debit mandate and How to cancel a direct debit mandate cover ending collections through a mandate. How to find a customer’s direct debit mandate on the Lendsqr admin console shows how to locate a specific borrower’s mandate record quickly. For practical insights on improving repayment collection rates through direct debit, read You can now activate your direct debit mandates in 1 minute on the Lendsqr blog.