What happens when a recurring payment fails?

What happens when a recurring payment fails? As a reminder, a recurring payment only occurs in the context of a subscription-based Rental.

The subscription moves to DISPUTE status

For more information on the DISPUTE status, please refer to this article. Following a failed debit, the dispute status is triggered: 1° when all monthly debit attempts have failed (intermediate transition through WARNING status in the event of a non-fatal error). 2° or when your PSP returns a fatal error on the very first debit attempt. For more information on the types of errors encountered by the PSP, click here. ==> the DISPUTE status is then definitive; we no longer attempt to automatically charge your customer for the current month's instalment. For more information on the dispute status, click here.

An unpaid subscription instalment line is generated in the Subscription menu.

1° Each unpaid instalment is associated with an invoice bearing the mention NON PAYEE. 2° Even if the debit for the previous instalment was unsuccessful and the subscription is in dispute, a new instalment will subsequently be generated each month and will indeed create a new associated invoice, for as long as the Rental has not ended. For more information, click here.

An automatic series of alert e-mails is sent to the customer

For each failed debit of a subscription instalment, your customer automatically receives an e-mail informing them and inviting them to regularise their situation (by logging into their customer account if necessary in order to update their bank card). Here are the e-mail templates sent in the event of a non-fatal error: 1st failure: Echec du renouvellement de votre abonnement Triggered: after the failure of the first rebill attempt. 2nd failure: Attention, 2ème relance, votre paiement est en échec Triggered: after the failure of all subsequent debit attempts. 3rd failure: Attention: résiliation de votre abonnement avant poursuites Triggered: after the failure of all rebill attempts. In the event of a fatal error, the 3rd template Attention: résiliation de votre abonnement avant poursuites is sent directly to the customer. In these e-mails, a link is included redirecting them to their customer account to carry out the card update procedure described above. You can customise these e-mails by going to Administration > Emails. For more information on e-mail configuration, click here.

You can also choose to customise this series of alert e-mails

1° Make sure to disable the 3 previous e-mail templates 2° Enable 1 or more of the 6 e-mails entitled "Échéance impayée" 3° Configure each of the enabled e-mails 4° Enable the scheduled task: "Notification client par e-mail - Échéance impayée".

Configuration of "Échéance impayée" e-mails

1° Configure the number of days following the payment failure after which you wish to send each e-mail 2° Configure its subject and body 3° Save Note: Rentals with a "cancelled" status are excluded from these e-mail sends.

What should be done to regularise a subscription in dispute?

=> Your customer must, depending on the reason for the failure, update their bank card details or regularise their situation (for example by topping up their bank account) so that the system can successfully charge them on the next attempts. If the customer is unable to log into their customer account on the mini-site, you always have the option of resending them a bank card update link via their customer record, under the Payment Method tab. For more details on this bank card update function, click here.

3 options to regularise a past unpaid instalment

1° The rebills batch successfully charged the current month's instalment and attempts to charge a second unpaid instalment starting from the oldest one. See Step 3 of this article for more details. Reminder: if the Rental associated with the disputed subscription has ended, this batch will not create a new instalment and will therefore not attempt to charge a second unpaid instalment. Only the two following solutions allow you to regularise a past unpaid instalment for an ended Rental. 2° You can attempt a manual debit of the instalment. 3° You can run the batch for Debit attempts on cards with non-definitive payment errors.

Manual debit attempt for the unpaid instalment

Two conditions must be met before attempting the debit in order to avoid unnecessary rejection fees from your PSP: 1° Your customer has updated their bank card 2° or the error returned by the PSP is temporary You can then attempt to manually charge your customer. For the procedure to follow, see this article.

Debit attempt for cards with non-definitive payment errors

You can manually run or automatically enable a programme that will attempt to charge all unpaid instalments due to non-definitive errors (i.e.: also called non-fatal or temporary errors) in your database associated with DISPUTE subscriptions (WARNING subscriptions and unpaid instalments due to fatal/definitive errors are therefore excluded). Click the purple button to run it manually, or enable the task by clicking the red button if you wish it to run on the 1st of each month.

IMPORTANT: 1° The scheduled task processes unpaid instalments in order of oldest first. 2° If the debit of the oldest unpaid instalment in the subscription succeeds, the programme automatically attempts to charge the second oldest instalment. You can thus charge the two oldest unpaid instalments on a single subscription in one go.

Application example

1. On 10/01, a subscription-based Rental is taken out. Your recurring payment configuration provides for 7 debit attempts at 3-day intervals.
2. On 10/02, the rebills batch attempts payment N°2 for February. Your PSP returns a payment error due to insufficient funds. The subscription moves to WARNING.
3. On 13, 16, 19, 22, 25 and 28/02, the rebills batch retries payment N°2. Each time, your PSP returns the same insufficient funds error.
4. On 28/02, the subscription moves to DISPUTE; the February instalment is created as unpaid with an invoice bearing the mention NON PAYEE.
5. On 10/03, the rebills batch attempts payment N°3 for March. Your PSP returns a payment error due to insufficient funds. The subscription remains in DISPUTE.
6. On 13, 16, 19, 22, 25, 28/03, the rebills batch retries payment N°3.
7. On 28/03, the subscription remains in DISPUTE; the March instalment is created as unpaid with an invoice bearing the mention NON PAYEE.
8. On 05/04, you manually run the debit attempt programme for cards with non-definitive payment errors. The programme first attempts to charge instalment N°2. Your PSP returns a successful debit! The programme automatically attempts to charge unpaid instalment N°3. Your PSP also returns a successful debit. The subscription reverts to ACTIVE status.

Important information about this debit attempt programme

If you trigger the scheduled debit attempt task multiple times on the same day:

• it does not retry subscriptions that could not be charged that day or the day before.
• it does not retry subscriptions that have already been successfully charged that day, to avoid rebilling the customer a 3rd and 4th time.

It only processes 200 recoveries at a time, so if there are more than 200 recoveries to be carried out, you will receive a message in the back office indicating that you should run the scheduled task again in order to process the remaining lines.

Finally, the customer updating their bank card automatically moves the subscription back to warning status. The subscription will therefore no longer be processed by this programme after a bank card update. However, it can, if you decide so, be processed as part of another programme — the one for regularising WARNING subscriptions following a bank card update. See this article for more details on bank card updates.