Failed payments and dunning

How Retrixus finds invoices that keep failing, counts the attempts, watches for them, and stops collection on just the plans you choose.

When a renewal payment fails, Recurly does not give up. It marks the invoice past due and tries the card again on a schedule, emailing the customer along the way. That retrying is called dunning. It ends when a payment goes through, when the schedule runs out, or when someone stops it.

Most of the time that is what you want. But sometimes an invoice should not be retried: the account was fraud, the customer already asked to cancel, or the card has failed so many times that each retry only adds a decline fee and hurts your standing with the card networks.

Finding them

Ask in plain words, for example:

• "Which invoices on the 3-day trial plan have failed five times or more?"
• "How many past-due invoices do we have, and how much is owed?"

Retrixus looks at every invoice that is still past due, however long ago it was created. An invoice that has been retrying for three weeks is included, not only those from the last few days.

How attempts are counted

For each past-due invoice, Retrixus counts the payment attempts on it that failed: the first try and every retry. It reads them from the invoice itself, so the count is exact. It is not the same number as Recurly's count of dunning emails sent: emails and retries can follow different schedules.

Watching for them

A watch can tell you when invoices pass a number of failed attempts. Start from the dunning attempts template and your AI will ask:

• from which attempt on to count (for example, 5);
• every plan, or only some.

It then checks every 15, 30 or 60 minutes and emails you when the count crosses the line you set.

Stopping collection, carefully

To stop the retries, ask your AI for a batch, for example: "Cancel those subscriptions and stop dunning on them." It will ask which invoices to stop:

• every past-due invoice on the account;
• only those for certain plans;
• only certain invoice numbers.

The choice matters when a customer has more than one plan. Stopping only the trial plan's invoices leaves the customer's other plan collecting normally. You can also tell it to leave out anyone on a plan that should never be touched ("skip anyone on a premium plan").

Stopping collection marks the invoices failed in Recurly. That cannot be undone, so the plan is always shown to you first, and nothing changes until you confirm it.