Alongside reaching over 100,000 children each week, Rocksteady provides around 10,000 free bursary spaces annually, ensuring that every child has the chance to experience music irrespective of circumstances.
“It’s nice to work for a company that has such a focus on improving children’s lives.” Ben adds.
With more than 3,700 schools already involved and ongoing growth of around 30% year on year, Rocksteady needed a payment infrastructure capable of scaling smoothly while protecting the parent experience.
The challenge
Before automation, Rocksteady relied on manual finance processes that became increasingly unsustainable as the organisation expanded.
Staff had to extract daily sign-up reports, manually create each mandate, process cancellations individually and perform heavy month-end clean-up work. As Ben puts it, “Every day someone had to download reports and create Direct Debits manually. Month-end could take days.”
The expansion of their service; tripling in size over roughly four years, magnified this challenge. “At the rate we were growing, we would’ve struggled to keep up without the right system,” Ben adds. The team needed a scalable payment engine that integrated with their bespoke CRM and removed repetitive admin.
This challenge reflects broader sector pressures: subscription-based education services must maintain reliable, low-friction payment journeys or risk operational strain.
The solution
Rocksteady partnered with Access PaySuite to fully automate their Direct Debit collection process. Building on their existing SmartDebit relationship, Access supported the team through a structured and collaborative migration onto their own SUN.
For a subscription-based business teaching more than 100,000 children every week, Direct Debit is the most natural and reliable payment method. It keeps recurring billing simple for parents, predictable for the organisation and dramatically reduces missed payments.
For Rocksteady, who rely on ongoing monthly payments at scale, this made Access Paysuite’s Direct Debit and Credit Management system the clear operational fit.
Once integrated with Rocksteady’s in-house CRM, Access PaySuite’s API enabled the automation of:
- Setting up new Direct Debit mandates
- Cancelling mandates when parents withdrew
- Updating collection amounts
- Issuing refunds via Direct Credit
- Synchronising month-end changes without manual intervention
The Access PaySuite team ensured the integration matched Rocksteady’s workflows precisely, supporting both the technical deployment and the operational transition.
Every time we've had an issue, it’s been resolved quickly. The team has always been friendly, responsive and reliable.
The results
- Significant time saved
Automated payment workflows save Rocksteady around one full week of staff time every month, time that would previously have been spent creating mandates, updating details and handling month-end changes. - Industry-leading collection rates
Rocksteady now achieves around 98% collection success, providing stable cashflow and reducing the need for manual chasing. - A smoother, more inclusive parent experience
Parents can sign up easily and pay automatically, helping reduce drop-off and making enrolment more accessible. This supports Rocksteady’s mission to offer music education that builds confidence and removes barriers. - Scalable operations without extra headcount
Even with fast subscriber growth, Rocksteady has avoided hiring additional finance staff. Automation ensures the team can focus on delivering impact rather than admin.
Without the automation, we’d have needed more staff to keep up with demand. It’s saved jobs and kept us ahead during very fast growth.
Next steps
Rocksteady plans to continue expanding its reach across UK primary schools, supported by a payment engine that needs to remain reliable as subscriber numbers surge.
Ben is clear about what they need next: “We’re aiming for another 30 percent growth next year and hopefully again the year after. We need a service that just ticks along every month without us having to think about it.”
With Access PaySuite underpinning their subscription billing and providing the automation required to manage high-volume monthly collections, Rocksteady is positioned to grow its impact while keeping administration low.
If you want to reduce admin, automate recurring payments and scale smoothly just like Rocksteady, speak to the Access PaySuite team about integrating Direct Debit with your systems.