We know it's important to have automatic contingencies in case something goes wrong with a scheduled payment. When this does happen, we transfer the payment to our dunning flow.
Before you configure your dunning flow, it's important to understand the difference between failed and declined payments, as these will be treated differently.
To start configuring your dunning settings, navigate to Settings > Configuration > Dunning and failed payments.
Failed Payments
When a payment fails for a reason that is not the fault of the customer, the payment is reattempted every few hours in case there's a resolution that doesn't require action from the customer. There's also an additional flow that the payment goes through before it gets to the declined flow. This gives the customer a bit more time to be able to resolve the issue. By default, this will be a 48h process before moving onto the declined payment dunning flow.
To configure this, navigate to the Failed tab on the dunning configuration:
In the first section, you can choose how long you'd like to reattempt the payment for, without prompting the customer to add a new payment method.
If you click the Customize email button you'll see the template of the email that we send out. You can change the customizable field(s) marked by the coloured line on the email by changing the text in the right side box.
If you'd like you or one of your team to be BCCed into these emails, you can do this by updating the BCC settings in the bottom right.
Declined payments
The declined flow is where we send payments that decline because of issues with the customer card. This is also the next step for payments that have been through the dunning flow of a failed payment.
You can configure up to 3 automatic re-attempts. You can change the timescale between each re-attempt, or limit the amount of re-attempts by changing the Status on failure to suspended or cancelled, instead of active in one of the reattempt boxes.
Important: If you select cancelled, then the subscription and the customer will be cancelled, which is irreversible - if you have this set to suspended, however, this is treated as an indefinite pause and is reversible.
Read more about the suspended status in our article on what it means when a customer's subscription is suspended.
Handling minimum terms
At the bottom of this page you can enable your dunning settings to override any minimum term contracts you have - we'll keep this as default. You can however decide to toggle on this feature and this will charge the customer the unpaid invoice and the rest of the contractual period in one invoice.
Writing off the invoice
If all attempts at collecting the payment fail, we'll stop attempting to collect payment and you'll need to let us know how to treat the invoice. In the bottom right you'll see Writing off the invoice. Here you'll have three options:
I'll write it off manually. This means the invoice will be left as unpaid and you'll need to make any changes to write the invoice off manually, in the app.
Write-off immediately. Once the final re-attempt has processed and returned as failed, this invoice will automatically be written off and unable to be re-attempted. You'll need to choose a subscription status as well - this should match the final re-attempts subscription status.
Scheduled write off. Here you'll want to choose both a subscription status, and a period of time (in hours) after the last re-attempt in which you can make any arrangements, but after that time period is up the invoice will be written off and the subscription will be changed the status chosen.