SEPA Direct Debit File

For clubs, landlords, trades businesses and small companies, the SEPA direct debit is the easiest way to collect money regularly. The catch: for more than a handful of debits the bank wants a file in the XML format pain.008, and it has strict rules. One wrong character in a name, a check digit off, or a due date on Good Friday, and the online banking rejects the whole file. You do not need expensive club software or an accounting program just for this one file.

In the first step you enter who collects: name, IBAN, optionally the BIC, and the creditor identifier you get for free from the Deutsche Bundesbank. The tool recalculates the check digits of the creditor identifier (ISO 7064, modulo 97) and tells you right away if a typo crept in. Then you choose core or business direct debit, the due date and how early your bank needs the file. The tool skips weekends and TARGET holidays (New Year, Good Friday, Easter Monday, 1 May, 25 and 26 December) and suggests the next possible bank business day.

In the second step you add the debits: by hand, from a CSV file from Excel or your member software, or from your customers in Fakturen. The CSV import detects separators, quotes and German numbers like 1.234,56 by itself and maps the columns by their header; you only check. Every IBAN is validated, umlauts in names and remittance texts are rewritten into the SEPA character set (ü becomes ue, ß becomes ss), and duplicate entries, duplicate references or a mandate unused for 36 months show up before the bank finds them.

In the third step you get the file. The default is pain.008.001.08, the format of the current European Payments Council rulebook and Annex 3 of the German Banking Industry Committee data transfer agreement. The older pain.008.001.02 is still offered for older banking software, but banks only reliably accept it until November 2026. Count and control sum are exact to the cent because the tool calculates in whole cents, and first, recurring, one-off and final debits land in their own batches automatically.

Before collecting, you must notify your customers, without another agreement 14 calendar days ahead. For that the tool creates a pre-notification letter per debit following DIN 5008, all in one PDF for printing, in the formal or informal German form of address. Amount, due date, mandate reference and creditor identifier are included, the IBAN only shortened. For e-mail you copy the text. You can add the last day for the pre-notification and the bank submission day to the deadline tracker with one click.

Important: the tool checks form, characters, sums and deadlines. Whether you may collect depends on your signed mandate and the collection agreement with your bank. This is not legal advice, and the file goes nowhere until you upload and approve it yourself in your online banking. What you enter stays in your browser.