Dunning

Dunning is what happens after a payment fails. It covers both halves of recovery: the technical retry schedule against the payment processor, and the communication sequence to the customer — email reminders, in-app notices, and eventually escalation to a human.

For card-based subscriptions, a well-tuned dunning sequence typically recovers 30–50% of failed payments that would otherwise become involuntary churn. That is often the highest-return work available to a billing team, because the customer already wants the product.

Retry timing is the whole game

Retrying immediately is usually pointless: the most common decline reasons — insufficient funds, temporary issuer block — resolve on their own within days. A sensible schedule spaces retries across several days and avoids retrying repeatedly on the same failure code.

Some decline codes should never be retried at all. A “card cancelled” or “do not honour” response will fail identically every time and each attempt costs a fee. Those need a card-update request rather than a retry.

B2B dunning is a different problem

Most dunning advice assumes a consumer card subscription. B2B invoicing works differently: the invoice goes to accounts payable on 30-day terms, nobody’s card declined, and the invoice is simply unpaid because it is sitting in someone’s approval queue.

Recovering that requires collections workflow — reminders before the due date, escalation to the economic buyer after it, and visibility for the account owner — rather than payment retries. A billing system that only models card retries leaves the larger half of B2B receivables uncovered.