How to bulk cancel and refund Recurly subscriptions without writing scripts

When a whole group of accounts needs the same fix, here is how to do it safely in Recurly, with a preview of every account, approvals for big jobs, and a record of every change.

By Thomas Fitzgerald, Marketing · 2026-10-18

Sooner or later every subscription team needs to fix a group of accounts at once. A burst of fake signups. A promotion that attracted the wrong customers. A partner who sends a list of accounts to cancel. A pricing mistake that needs refunding.

Recurly's admin is built for one account at a time, and its API can do anything, if someone writes the script. Most teams end up with a CSV, a Python script somebody wrote two years ago, and a nervous afternoon.

What a safe bulk fix needs

Whatever tool you use, a bulk change to billing should have:

1. A precise list. Built from a query you can re-run, not a hand-edited spreadsheet.
2. A preview of every account. How many, the refund total, and which ones will fail and why, before anything changes.
3. The right order. Cancel before refunding, so nothing renews in between. Refund to the original card, not account credit. Write notes last, so they describe what actually happened.
4. Approval for big jobs. Someone other than the person who planned it signs off above a limit.
5. Resumability. If it stops halfway, running it again finishes the job without doing anything twice.
6. A record. Who did what to which account, when, and why.

Doing it in conversation

With Retrixus, start by finding the accounts:

"Which accounts signed up from affiliate partner-114 on Thursday evening and have a successful charge?"

Then describe the fix:

"Cancel their subscriptions now, refund their open charges to the card, tag them as card testing, and add a note."

Your AI asks for each choice the fix needs and never guesses:

• Cancel how: now, or at the end of the paid term? Which subscription states? All plans or some?
• Refund what: every open charge, or only above a minimum? In what date range?
• Stop collection on which invoices: all past-due ones, only certain plans, or certain invoice numbers?
• Which fields to set, and whether to keep a value already there.
• What the note says.
• Who to leave out: for example anyone holding a plan you never touch.

The preview

Before anything changes you see:

• how many accounts, subscriptions and charges are affected, and the refund total;
• accounts left out, and why;
• accounts it expects to fail, and why;
• accounts flagged because a step found nothing to do on them, which usually means they were picked by mistake;
• a few notes written out in full.

You can ask for the complete list as a spreadsheet.

Approval and running

Over your organisation's limits, by default 1,000 accounts or $2,500 in refunds, an Admin or Owner approves the batch. It cannot be the person who planned it. Then it runs in the background, safe to stop at any time, and an account already handled is never handled twice.

Every change is recorded in your audit log, and the note on each account is written from what actually happened, so it never claims a refund that did not go through.

Save it for next time

"Save this as our card-testing playbook."

Next time, your AI only asks for the dates and the criteria.

What you need

Bulk fixes are part of Retrixus Business, on a Recurly site you have switched to read and write. Start free and read how batches work.