Fixing failed recurring payments

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A customer's recurring payment may fail for a number of reasons.

The most common are these:

The customer used a debit card and has insufficient funds in their account for the transaction.
- This will return an error message "Insufficient funds."
The customer's card has expired.
- This will return an error message "Card is expired" or similar.
The customer's card has been canceled due to fraud or suspicious activity.
- This will return an error message of "Declined," "Do not honor" or similar.
The customer's bank flagged the coreFORCE transaction as suspicious and sent the customer a fraud alert.
- This will return an error message similar to a canceled card.

When a recurring payment fails, you can configure coreFORCE to send the customer an email giving the error message from the bank and asking them to update their payment information. You can turn on this email in Orders > Setup on the Emails tab. There are two email messages, titled "Recurring Payment Error" and "Recurring Payment Error without User Account".

You can also configure the system to send you a notification when the recurring payment process runs each night. This is configured in Orders > Setup in the Notifications Tab. It is called Recurring Payments.

Requires Attention

Once a recurring payment fails, the system will flag it as "requires attention" and will not attempt it again until one of the following happens:

The customer updates their card information. This will automatically clear "requires attention". They can do this on the my account page under Payment methods.
You clear the "requires attention" box. You can do this if the customer lets you know that they have resolved whatever issue was going on with their card but don't need to give you a new card number (for example, if the card was declined for insufficient funds, the customer has put sufficient funds into the account)
NOTE: if the customer replaced a payment method with a totally different card, you will also need to select the new payment method in the dropdown list under Payment Information. Normally there should only be two options in the list, the old inactive account which is selected, and the new account which the customer added.
You update the customer's payment information for them. You can do this on the Recurring Payments screen by select [New Account] in the Account dropdown under Payment Information and then filling in their new card details (see screenshot)

Moving Forward

For the sake of example, let's say you are now in a situation where a customer's account has not been charged for a membership in several months.

In order for the customer's account to be charged, the "Requires Attention" flag will need to be removed. This can also be done from the list view by selecting the record and using the actions menu in the top right corner of the list view to remove the "Requires Attention" flag from selected record.

Option 1: Fully Automated - Upon removing the "Requires Attention" flag, the customer's account will be billed daily for the sale price listed in his recurring payment record (Let's say $20.00) until the Next Billing Date is no longer in the past.

Option 2: Automated with Manual Input Required - You could manually change the price listed in his recurring payment record ($20 multiplied by however many months were missed) and then being diligent to go back to the recurring payment record after that charge runs and moving the next payment date into the future (generally the same day as the date of expiration in the correlated contact subscription record) and correcting the price back to $20.

Option 3: Entirely Manual - You could also move the next billing date to and then bill the customer for the other months through another means whether that be in coreSTORE, directly through your payment gateway (this record of payment would not be associated with an order in coreFORCE), or through an invoice created in coreFORCE.