Recovering failed payments is an important part of any business that deals in Subscriptions or Payment Plans. Spiffy comes equipped with a few different methods for recovering payments, from automatic solutions to manual solutions.

Automatic Retries

When a Subscription or Payment Plan payment fails, the payment will automatically reattempt the charge 3 additional times over the period of about 2 weeks.

• ALL Payment Plan Auto Retries – Will auto-retry on a 1, 3 & 5-day schedule
• Stripe Subscription Auto Retries – Based on your Stripe auto-retry settings
• PayPal Subscription Auto Retries – Will auto-retry on a 1, 3 & 5-day schedule

What happens at the end of all retries?
Stripe Subscriptions: By default, Stripe will auto-cancel the subscription unless you change a setting in Stripe to take a different action at the end of all retries. We recommend adjusting the setting in Stripe. Change the setting to Mark as unpaid, or Leave as-is. This will make it so that at the end of all auto-retry attempts, the subscription will move to an Unpaid status, and not automatically cancel. This will trigger the Subscription Unpaid billing automation event, where you can set up internal or customer-facing processes to recover the at-risk subscription.

Payment Plans & PayPal Subscriptions: At the end of all retries, the status of the payment plan or PayPal subscription will change to Unpaid status. This will trigger the Subscription Unpaid billing automation event, where you can set up internal or customer-facing processes to recover the at-risk subscription.

Failed Payment Emails / Card Update Auto-Retry Settings

By default, Spiffy has very basic, simple notification emails that are automatically sent to your customer when a payment fails or their card is expiring. These emails will contain a link for your customer to update their card on file.

Additionally, you also have a couple of account settings to handle auto-retry behavior upon card update (By the customer, or when a team member updates the card in Spiffy.)

Failed Payment & Expiring Card Emails

Customer email notifications for Failed Payments and Expiring/Expired card events are activated by default. To change these settings, navigate to Account Settings > Customer Notifications.

The default emails are sent from your support email address, and are branded with your company logo in the header of the email. Your support email address and company logos are pulled into these emails from your Company settings. Be sure to check and update your Company Settings.

Auto-Charge Balance Settings

By default, when a customer updates their card on file after a failed payment, Spiffy is set up to automatically charge the outstanding balance on the new card immediately.

If you do not want this functionality, you can deactivate this feature. There are two settings, 1) for when a card is updated via a Team member, and 2) when the customer updates their own card from within the Customer Portal.

Navigate to Account Settings > Automation. Enable any settings you might need. When enabled, Spiffy will automatically reattempt to charge the past-due balance within 30 minutes.

Manually Retrying a Payment in Customer’s Record

Need to retry a failed payment? You can easily accomplish this from the Payments section of your customer’s record. See our Retry Failed Payment documentation.