A 10-minute weekly billing check-in for small subscription teams

Six questions to ask every Monday that tell you whether your subscription business is healthy, and which ones are worth turning into automatic alerts.

By Thomas Fitzgerald, Marketing · 2026-10-18

Big subscription companies have analysts and dashboards. Most small ones have a founder who opens the billing system on a Monday, scrolls for a bit, and gets a feeling. Feelings miss things: a gateway quietly declining more cards, refunds creeping up, a signup source drying up.

Here is a check-in you can run in ten minutes, every week, by asking six questions. Each one is written the way you'd ask it in Claude or ChatGPT with Retrixus connected.

1. Are new customers still arriving?

"How many new subscriptions started in the last 3 days, by plan, compared with the 3 days before?"

Look for a plan or a week that's suddenly different. A drop often means a broken checkout page or an ad campaign that ended.

2. Where are they coming from?

"For new subscriptions this week, which traffic sources did they come from?"

This works when your checkout records a source on the account, often as UTM custom fields. It tells you which channel to thank, and which one to look at.

3. Did their first payments go through?

"Of accounts created this week, how many had a successful first charge, and what were the most common decline reasons for the rest?"

A healthy business sees most first charges succeed. A sudden rise in declines on new signups can mean a payment problem, or fraud.

4. Are renewal payments getting through?

"What share of renewal charges declined in the last 7 days, and the top reasons?"

Renewal declines are where quiet churn starts. "Insufficient funds" usually recovers on a retry; expired and invalid cards don't, unless the customer updates them.

5. How much did we refund, and is it creeping up?

"How many refunds did we issue in the last 3 days, and the total, compared with the 3 days before?"

6. How much is owed right now?

"How many invoices are past due right now, and how much is owed in total?"

This one looks at every unpaid invoice, however old.

Turn the important ones into alerts

You shouldn't have to wait until Monday to find out your decline rate doubled on Thursday. Pick the two or three numbers that would hurt most and set watches:

"Tell me if renewal declines go above 30% in any hour."

"Alert me if new signups in a day drop below half of normal."

Retrixus first shows you when each alert would have fired on your own recent history, then checks every 15, 30 or 60 minutes and emails you or posts to Slack.

A note on history

Retrixus answers these from live Recurly data over the last seven days, and background analysis covers up to 30. For month-over-month and year-over-year trends, keep your history in a warehouse, or let Warehouse Sync load it into your own BigQuery.

Start free on one Recurly site.