Failed payments: smart retry

Overview

An expired card, a blocked account, a declined payment – failed collections are part of everyday subscription life. Kyvento responds in two stages: with automatic immediate retries right after the failure and with payment-driven retry attempts along your dunning levels.

Stage 1: Automatic retries during subscription collection

If the collection of a renewal invoice fails, Kyvento automatically retries – after 6 hours, 24 hours and 72 hours. This covers temporary causes (daily limit, short-term funds) without you having to intervene.

If all four attempts remain unsuccessful, Kyvento informs your team (the "All payment attempts exhausted" notification) and suspends the affected subscription – the open invoice moves into the regular dunning process. Technical outages at the payment provider, by the way, do not count as a failed attempt: here Kyvento checks at short intervals until the provider is reachable again.

Stage 2: Retry along the dunning levels

In the dunning levels ("Settings" → "Dunning") you enable the "Retry payment" option per level: before the dunning notice goes out, Kyvento charges the stored payment method once more. Only if that also fails is the dunning notice sent and the fee charged – many cases resolve quietly this way, before the customer ever sees a dunning notice.

When the very first payment fails

For a newly booked subscription, Kyvento treats the first collection separately. Until that first payment is confirmed, the subscription sits at “Payment pending”: it exists and is visible in the list, but it is not running — no access, no follow-up billing, no webhooks. Only the confirmed payment turns it into an active subscription.

If the first payment ultimately fails, the status changes to “Not activated” and stays there. That is deliberately different from a subscription that expired normally: you can see at a glance that this contract never came about. A new attempt is a new booking.

The reasoning: a customer should not receive a service that was never paid for. With card payments using 3-D Secure this is the normal case — a few seconds pass between order and confirmation, during which the subscription shows “Payment pending”.

Special case: returned direct debit and chargeback

If money comes back – a SEPA direct debit return or a card chargeback – Kyvento automatically sets the invoice back to "Overdue" and starts the separate chargeback dunning ladder with its own deadlines and fees. This way you treat reversals (which often incur fees) more strictly than a simple decline.

What you can do

• Subscribe to the "Payment failed" and "All payment attempts exhausted" notifications (both marked as "Critical").
• Enable "Retry payment" at least on the payment reminder level.
• The credit card expiry monitoring reminds customers automatically before their card expires – see the setup wizard or "Settings" → "Payments".

Next steps

• Configure dunning levels – see "Customizing dunning levels and texts"
• Set returned direct debit fees – see "Charging dunning fees"