The Card Expired event triggers when your customer has not updated their card on file by the end of the month that matches the expiration date on their card. For example, it’s July 31st, 2026 all customers who have a card on file with an expiration date of July of that same year, (Exp: 07/26), will experience the actions that you set up for the Card Expired billing event.

This is separate from the Failed Payment event and is meant to be a final reminder for your customer to update their payment information before their payment fails. If your customer’s billing date is the 31st of the month, and you have both Card Expired and Failed Payment events set up within Spiffy, both events will trigger that day. Here are two scenarios to better explain how these two actions work.

Scenario #1:

If someone’s billing date is the last day of the month, and their card expires this month. Both the Failed Payment and Card Expired actions would fire on the last day of the month.

Scenario #2:

If someone’s billing date is the 21st of the month, and their card expires next month.

The Failed Payment action would fire on the 21st, and the Card Expired action would fire on the last day of next month.

If you do not want your customers to experience Scenario #1 (on the first of the month), you’ll want to set up these events to apply tags and build a filter within your marketing automation tool (based on those tags), so only one of those follow up sequences will be delivered. 

This event is most commonly used to trigger a single, final courtesy reminder email that reminds customers to update their card on file. So it’s not necessarily a huge deal if the handful of customers with payments on the last day of the month get one extra email. If you’re doing a significant volume of transactions on the last day of the month, you may want to consider the workaround mentioned in the previous paragraph. Please reach out if you have any questions about this.

Be sure to include a link to your Customer Portal in your follow-up emails. 

Click here to learn more about how your customers can update their credit card with your Customer Portal.