Invoices & payments

Failed payments: smart retry

Overview

An expired card, a blocked account, a declined payment — failed collections are part of everyday subscription life. The most important point first, because it contradicts a common expectation: after a declined payment, Kyvento does not retry the collection on its own. The invoice stays open, and dunning takes over.

What happens right after a declined collection

For a subscription renewal, Kyvento creates the invoice and collects it via the customer's stored payment method. If the payment provider declines — card declined, insufficient funds, provider unreachable — the following applies:

  • The invoice stays open and is marked as overdue by the daily check run once the payment term has passed. The subscription keeps running for now.
  • Your team receives the "Payment failed" notification.
  • There are no automatic retries after hours or days. The next collection attempt comes from dunning — or from the customer via the customer portal.
  • If the customer has no payment method stored, no collection takes place at all; the invoice is open from the start.

The one place for a renewed collection: the dunning level

Under "Settings" → "Dunning", every dunning level carries the "Retry payment" switch. When it is set, Kyvento charges the payment method once more upon reaching that level — and only sends the dunning notice if that fails.

By default the switch is enabled on the first dunning level after the payment reminder, so roughly two weeks after the due date. If you want to collect earlier, enable it on the payment reminder already.

Three outcomes are possible:

  • Collection succeeds — the invoice is paid, no dunning notice goes out and no fee is charged. The customer notices nothing of the dunning run.
  • Collection fails — Kyvento charges the level's fee, sends the dunning notice and suspends the subscription if the level provides for that.
  • Provider unreachable — this does not count as a failed attempt. Kyvento tries again at the next dunning run, without fee, notice or suspension.

Suspending a subscription for non-payment is therefore a decision of your dunning ladder, not the consequence of technical retries — details in Customizing dunning levels and texts.

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.

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: nobody should receive a service that was never paid for. With card payments using 3-D Secure, "Payment pending" is in fact the normal state for a few seconds — between order and confirmation.

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, moves the due date to the day of the reversal and starts a separate dunning ladder for reversals. Its texts name the returned direct debit instead of reminding the customer of a payment. You find the levels under "Settings" → "Dunning" → "Dunning levels" when you switch the "Dunning type" field to "Chargeback".

Two of its defaults differ from the normal dunning ladder and are worth knowing:

  • No fee is set. You enter a returned-debit fee yourself, per level.
  • "Retry payment" is disabled — collecting again from an account that has just reversed a payment usually only produces the next return, including bank fees.

If your payment provider does not report a reversal automatically, record it by hand — see Recording a chargeback manually.

To be distinguished: technical errors during renewal

A different case is the renewal itself failing technically — meaning the invoice is never created in the first place, for example because of an infrastructure error or a missing exchange rate. Only then does Kyvento repeat the operation automatically with growing intervals over a few days, and suspend the subscription if the last attempt also fails.

A declined payment never reaches this path — by then the invoice already exists. Anyone confusing the two will look for retries that do not happen at this point.

What you can do

  • Subscribe to the "Payment failed" and "Chargeback" notifications — so you learn about declines and reversals immediately.
  • Decide deliberately on which dunning level a renewed collection should happen.
  • The most convenient way out of a declined payment is the customer themselves: send them the link to the customer portal, where they can replace their payment method.

Next steps

← Back to Support

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