When you send a customer to Debitura through your platform's "Send to Collection" flow, the customer goes through a Debitura-hosted onboarding page that is branded with your logo and colours. This article walks through what they see step by step, so you can answer their questions and help them when they get stuck.

Note: this article covers the happy-path flow for a brand-new Debitura customer. If your initial POST /clients call returned a 409 ClientExistsNeedsLinking response (the customer already has a Debitura account), the customer follows a different flow - see Referral Partners: 409 conflict path - what your customer sees and what your platform does.

Your customers do not log into a separate Debitura portal. The onboarding pages run on Debitura infrastructure but are styled with your logo, colours, and font, so the experience feels like a continuation of your own product. The legal documents the customer signs name Debitura as the platform provider (required for compliance), but no separate Debitura account or password is ever created for the customer.

For what is configured during white-label setup, see Referral Partners: White-label customization and branding options.

The flow has seven steps. Steps 1 and 7 happen between your platform and Debitura. Steps 2 to 6 are what your customer actually sees on screen.

When your customer clicks "Send to Collection" (or whatever you call this action in your product), your backend calls Debitura's Referral Partner API to register the customer. Debitura returns a unique onboarding URL. Your platform is responsible for presenting that URL to the customer (by redirect, in-app prompt, or your own email). Debitura does not email the link to your customer.

The customer arrives at an onboarding page hosted on referral.debitura.com. The page header shows your logo, and the buttons, background, and font use your colour scheme. Unless the customer inspects the URL or reads the legal disclosures inside the contracts, there is no visible Debitura branding.

The first form asks the customer to confirm (and optionally correct) their company information: legal name, company registration number or VAT number, registered address, and country. These fields are pre-filled from the data you sent in the original API call. The customer can edit any field before continuing.

The next page lists the users who will have access to the Debitura account. The primary user (the one going through onboarding) is added automatically as Admin. The customer can update an email address, change anyone's role, or invite additional team members by name and email. This step can be skipped without adding anyone.

If your customer is being routed to a collection partner that requires KYC verification (currently UK-based partners only), an extra step appears between Users and Roles and contract signing. The customer is asked to provide details about a senior manager or director: full name, home address, and date of birth.

This step is automatically skipped if the customer is not being routed to a KYC-requiring partner, or if KYC information is already on file for this customer.

The signing page presents the legal agreements the customer must sign before cases can be worked:

To sign, the customer reads the agreement on screen, receives a 6-digit verification code by email (sent to the primary user's email address), enters the code, and draws or types a digital signature. The signature is legally binding. Debitura stores the signed PDF and records the customer's IP address and timestamp for the audit trail.

For the legal background, see Contracts & signatures: SDCA, PoA, and the legal framework (overview).

After signing, the customer sees a confirmation page ("Onboarding complete") with a "Go back" button. The destination depends on your configuration:

If neither is configured, the customer sees an error page. This is a partner configuration problem and should be raised with your technical team or with Debitura. See Referral Partners: Support channels, SLA, and escalation.

If your partnership has a jurisdiction-specific pricing carveout configured and the case amount exceeds the carveout threshold, the signing page bundles a Pricing Appendix alongside the PoA. The customer sees one signing screen, and one signature covers both documents. This applies to roughly five percent of customers or fewer and requires no extra action from your support team.

Once the customer finishes signing, Debitura marks the customer record as onboarded. Your platform's next API call for that customer returns "ready" instead of "onboarding required", and the customer can have cases submitted on their behalf. Debitura also sends a welcome email to the primary user, using your branded email template. This is the one email Debitura sends on your behalf during the referral flow.

The main onboarding link does not have a time-based expiry. As long as the link record is active, the customer can return to the same URL and continue from where they stopped.

One exception: if your API call returned a 409 conflict (the customer already has a Debitura account), the approval link in that response expires after the partner's configured approval window - 7 days by default, configurable up to 30. If the customer clicks an expired approval link (or never opens it), you receive a client.link_expired webhook; to recover, call the API again with the same payload to generate a fresh link.

When a customer reports a problem during onboarding (link not working, code not arriving, signing failing), see Referral Partners: Customer signup / activation issues for the common causes and resolutions.

For day-to-day customer questions about cases, attribution, or the dashboard, see Referral Partners: How to support your customers using Debitura.