With a payment order, you can instruct your bank to make various payments from your account.

Consumers can cancel a SEPA core direct debit mandate by informing their bank or the payee about the cancellation. If you contact your bank, the cancellation will be effective from the business day following the point in time of receipt of the cancellation. Once a direct debit mandate is cancelled (this should ideally be declared in text form), subsequent payments are no longer authorised; direct debit payments that have already been made are to be reimbursed. It is therefore important that either the payee or the bank receives the cancellation by the end of the business day prior to the due date (section 675p (2) of the German Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch – BGB)).

In the case of SEPA business-to-business direct debits, which are exclusively limited to transactions between business clients, the payer does not have the right to cancel payment orders. In other words, it is not possible to cancel a direct debit payment made from the payer’s account in such cases.

In principle, a transfer order cannot be cancelled once it has been received by the bank (section 675p (1) of the BGB).

But if the bank and the consumer have agreed on a specific date for executing the transfer (e.g. standing orders), the consumer may cancel the payment order by the end of the business day prior to the agreed date (section 675p (3) of the BGB).

A payment order may be revoked after these dates only if this has been agreed beforehand. In the cases set out in section 675p (2) of the BGB, payment orders may only be revoked with the consent of the payee (section 675p (4) of the BGB).