Collections Management: #3 Tackling Payment Failures

Collections Management: #3 Tackling Payment Failures

Sam refreshed the dashboard.

Warning
"Payment failed".

Same customer. Same subscription. This is happening for the third time. He sends a usual email: "Your renewal payment failed again. Could you please check and retry?"

A couple of days passed, and there was still no response. Sam calls the customer, "Hey, could you update your card details or retry the payment?"

"Oh, yes, yes.. I'll do it today. Just remind me later this evening", the customer responded casually. That "remind me later" became multiple reminders. By the time the payment finally went through, Sam had invested more time following up on one failed transaction than on handling five smooth customers.

At that moment, he realised something important. Failed payments are a niche issue, but following up on them is the real problem.

Dunning to Rescue 

Dunning management in Zoho Billing takes over the moment a payment fails and handles payment recovery automatically. All you need to do is configure the rule for it.


Standard Dunning 

The standard dunning process enables you to configure retries for both online and offline subscriptions.

For online payments, such as card, ACH, and UPI mandates, Zoho Billing automatically retries the payment at predefined intervals, for example, on Days 1, 3, and 7. Whether the payment attempt is successful or not, the customer is eventually notified. The subscription remains active during these retries until it reaches the last and final attempt. Businesses can configure whether the subscription should remain active or be cancelled after all retries are complete.

For offline payments, such as cash or bank transfers, dunning doesn't retry. Instead, Zoho Billing automatically sends follow-up reminders at increasing urgency. Every delayed payment receives a structured and consistent notification sequence. Even for offline dunning, businesses can configure the final action to be taken on the subscription after it has been escalated to the customer.

Advanced Dunning 

Pause & Resume Dunning 
Sometimes, customers genuinely need time to update their payment details, talk to their bank, or resolve a card issue. Now, dunning can be paused for a specific invoice with the following conditions:

  • The resume date must be earlier than the next billing date.

  • The customer can manually resume the dunning process at any time before the scheduled resume date.

When dunning resumes:

  • If the selected resume date falls between scheduled retries, the next retry will occur on the next scheduled retry date.

  • If the resume date is after the final retry, Zoho Billing automatically triggers a retry within a day.

This helps businesses stay structured while giving customers time to breathe.


Stop Dunning 

At any point, you can decide to stop pursuing payment retry for an invoice under dunning. Zoho Billing allows you to,

  • Stop the dunning process entirely, removing the subscription from the dunning flow.

  • Mark the next retry as the final attempt for the auto-charge subscription. 

If the upcoming retry is set as the final attempt (whether successful or not), the configured action under the standard dunning rule for the final action will be triggered.


On-Demand Dunning  

Zoho Billing provides an option to send a link to update payment information when we notify customers of payment failure. This enables customers to update their information instantly without needing to navigate the interface. If a customer updates their card or fixes a billing issue and says, "Can you try charging again now?"


You don't have to wait for the next scheduled dunning to attempt the payment. Zoho Billing offers an On-demand Retry option, enabling businesses to try charging the customer immediately and directly from the invoice. This avoids waiting time and reduces the risk of failure.

Multi-Dunning Rules 

Not all customers should be treated as the same. Some require more time for grace, while others need quick closure. Zoho Billing supports multiple dunning rules, allowing businesses to assign different retry strategies to different subscriptions.

Each rule includes:

  • A personalised retry schedule (number of retries + interval)

  • Unique email template for communication.

  • Criteria that determine when the rule applies.

  • Priority order (Zoho matches rules based on priority)

You can set these criteria based on,

  • Customers

  • Subscriptions

  • Plans or Product

  • Invoice value

  • Currency

  • Billing Frequency.

A total of six unique rules can be created, including the default one. High-value customers can receive more retries and personalised emails, while other customers can have shorter cycles.

​
Reports Based on Dunning 

When payment fails or an invoice enters a dunning cycle, it's more about the retries than the visibility that a business should get. The Under-Risk report in Zoho Billing provides businesses with a real-time view of all transactions currently under the dunning process. It highlights which customers are at risk of churn or suspension, how long payments have been pending and which retry stage each invoice is in.

​
To track down customers who dropped off due to churn, Zoho Billing offers the Churned after Retries report. This report helps businesses re-engage with those customers, as the downgrade/churn was not intended to occur. This gives a high chance of winning them back.
​
What Dunning Management Does to Business 

With these capabilities, Zoho Billing shifts the handling of failed payments from a reactive to a proactive approach. Payment retries are automated, and customers receive notifications without requiring manual intervention. Businesses can pause, stop or define a final retry action. Sending personalised emails and providing time for customers based on their worth ensures reliability and trust.

On the whole, the automated dunning process helps businesses to keep the payment process organised and, at the same time, reduce the risk of losing control over failing payments.

 

Notes
Up Next: Collection as a Journey

 

 



      • Sticky Posts

      • Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020

        Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here's

      • Community Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020

        Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly you

      • Community Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020

        Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate most

      • Introducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020

        Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! ​ Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides

        • Recent Topics

        • ZOHO CRM Button Integration

          Hi Team, I’m currently working with Zoho CRM along with a custom application where I fetch deal details from the CRM and use them based on my requirements for each deal. Now, I want to enhance this setup. I plan to create a button on the Deal Detail page

        • Incorrect Functioning of Time Logs API (Version 3)

          We need to fetch the list of time logs for each task for our company internal usage. We are trying to achieve it by using the next endpoint: https://projects.zoho.com/api-docs#bulk-time-logs#get-all-project-time-logs Firstly, in the documentation the

        • Changing settings for auto logoff

          I've noticed that when I haven't used Cliq for a while, I have to re-enter my password. That is really clumsy, especially if you have a complicated password. Because it won't be filled in automatically. Is there a way to change that behaviour? We are

        • A few Issues when using "Pay Bill via Check"

          We have quite a bit of issues with how paying for Bills via Check works. Would love some feedback from the Zoho team in case we are doing something incorrectly. 1. When we go from a vendor and select "Pay Bill via Check" option, we see ALL the outstanding

        • Retainer invoice in Zoho Finance modlue

          Hello, Is there a way of creating retainer invoices in the Zoho Finance module? If not can I request this is considered for future updates please.

        • Dynamic image in form works in the app but not on the customer portal.

          img = frm_Fichas[ID == input.Nombre].Foto; imgno = Nophoto[ID2 = 1].Image; if(len(img) > 1) { img = img.replaceAll("/sharedBy/appLinkName/",zoho.appuri); img = img.replaceAll("viewLinkName","Fichas_de_personal_public"); img = img.replaceAll("fieldName","Foto");

        • Actual vs Minimum

          Hi all, I am sure I am not the only one having this need. We are implementing billing on a 30-minute increment, with a minimum of 30 minutes per ticket. My question is, is there a way to create a formula or function to track both the minimum bill vs the

        • Prevent tracking users from specific countries

          Currently, I’m receiving many bot visits from the United States and Malaysia. I would like these visits not to be recorded in SalesIQ. I already enabled the option to exclude traffic from cloud service providers, but I’m still receiving bot visits. Ideally,

        • My client requires me to have custom pdf file names to except payment for invoices, how can I customize this before emailing.

          Hello! I love the program so far but there are a few things that are standing in the way. I hope you guys can code them in so I can keep the program for years to come. My client requires I customize the pdf file names I send in for billing. Can you please

        • CRM x WorkDrive: We're rolling out the WorkDrive-powered file storage experience for existing users

          Release plan: Gradual rollout to customers without file storage add-ons, in this order: 1. Standalone CRM 2. CRM Plus and Zoho One DCs: All | Editions: All Available now for: - Standalone CRM accounts in Free and Standard editions without file storage

        • WorkDrive issues with Windows Explorer Not Responding

          We are using WorkDrive to collaborate on editing video content. We have a lot of files and quite a few are a few gigs. Recently anytime I try and work with the files Explorer freezes for a couple minutes whether it's dragging the files into Premiere or

        • Edit Project Number?

          Hi all: We just signed up for a trial of zoho one, which includes ZoHo Projects. We've noticed there was a 'dummy project' preloaded in projects to help familiarize yourself with the software. We've created a couple of our own projects now but noticed since the dummy project was preloaded, our projects start with number 2 then 3, sequentially. Since it seems we will be keeping zoho past the trial, If we delete the dummy project, how do we get our own projects renumbered, beginning with 1? We'd like

        • Download pricebook products & details - not just pricebook creation date & name

          We're looking to download a copy of a pricebook and its associated products & book prices (as we have several offices in different countries selling the same products), however, when using the export feature under Data administration it only gives me

        • Let us view and export the full price books data from CRM

          I quote out of CRM, some of my clients have specialised pricing for specific products - therefore we use Price Books to manage these special prices. I can only see the breakdown of the products listed in the price book and the specialised pricing for

        • A2P 10DLC Opt-in Rejection Issue with Zoho Creator Public Form

          Hi everyone, I’m working on an A2P 10DLC SMS campaign and running into repeated rejections due to opt-in issues. I’m using Zoho Creator for the registration flow. The form is public (no login required). Users enter their phone number and there is an unchecked

        • Assign Meeting in records

          It would be nice to be able to "call and assing" meetings from a record, for example from a Deal. Right now - calendar is synced with CRM - meetings show in calendar - you can go in each meeting and assign it to a record It would be nice to be able to

        • Allow Global Admin to access/edit all forms without changing owners

          Hi there, Please consider adding a feature where the Global Admin of the account an automatically access/edit any form in the Company Account. I'm the Global Admin on our Zoho One plan, and we have multiple users that use/create forms. But for me to access

        • ERROR: "Please enter a valid Phone"

          WHAT IS THE PHONE FORMAT? There is nothing ANYWHERE to define the format. At least the error should either show the correct format or provide a link to the help file I enter a valid phone number in as many formats as I can think of and none of them allow me to save the number to CRM Nothing works! No matter what format I enter I keep getting a red error "Please enter a valid Phone" The international format for MY mobile is +61414652366 (or +61 414 652 366) Local format is 0414652366 I call all over

        • Client and Vendor portal at the same time

          We have companies that serve both as clients and vendors and they are linked. However, we have a problem giving them access to the vendor/client portal. If they accept the invitation from the client portal, when we try to invite them to the vendor portal

        • How to create a boxplot chart in Zoho Analytics?

          Hi, I'm looking forward to making a boxplot in Zoho Analytics, either with all my data or with a time segmentation. No documentation or YouTube video explaining that was found. I guess this is a feature gap. How feasible would it be to add this to Analytics?

        • Introducing Zoho Sprints 3.0

          Zoho Sprints is consistently evolving in steady increments. The introduction of the latest version, with its enterprise level solutions, brings to you advanced capabilities that propel your agile efforts in the right direction. Here's a quick glimpse

        • Can we rely on order of returned ids when inserting multiple records?

          Hello! API https://www.zoho.com/crm/developer/docs/api/v8/insert-records.html does not mention that the response array will match the input array*, keeping this important information implicit and someone might have doubts to rely on it. (*the response

        • Transaction Rules & Customer Payments

          So I have a situation as follows. We have many clients who are all invoiced on the 1st of each month on a recurring invoice for 1 of 10 plans. This means that almost all payment dates are the same (some people pay late) and that a lot of the amounts are

        • Customize Sign-out Button

          Are there some url parameters I can use to make a form button sign-out the user from the app? The sign-out link on the top right is small. Here's and example of the url for the top right sign-out: https://creator.zoho.com/logoutpage.jsp?sharedBy=niskypto&appID=212085000006568003&appLinkName=MYAPP&signOutUrl=niskypto/MYAPP/view-login/SOMEPAGE Note: In my account, the sign-out is set to redirect users to my website. Can I also override this with some url parameters? John M. Whitney

        • Please can the open tasks be shown in each customer account at the top.

          Hi there This has happened before, where the open tasks are no longer visible at the top of the page for each customer in the CRM. They have gone missing previously and were reinstated when I asked so I think it's just after an update that this feature

        • Extend color coding to custom picklist fields

          Objectively, Projects has the best UI of any Zoho app — clean, intuitive, and never feels bloated. Big props to whoever owns the design. Feature request: color coding for custom picklist field values in field customization. You've already done it in two

        • Tip #65 - Exploring Technician Console: Short Keys - 'Insider Insights'

          Hello Zoho Assist Community! Have you ever been in the middle of a remote support session, trying to pass a key combination onto the remote machine, only to find it's reflecting on the technician's computer. The Short Keys feature in Zoho Assist is here

        • Reading from and writing to Zoho Projects Custom Module with Deluge

          Does anyone know if there is a way to read from and write to the Custom Modules that Zoho now supports. I would love to be able to loop through a set of data and create the entities I need to for this new custom module I'm looking to put together.

        • Disappointment with Zoho Payments

          Dear Gowdhaman, I am writing to inform you that I am removing Zoho Payments from my website. I cannot continue to disappoint my customers due to the lack of UPI support, as has been the case with my experience so far. Please note that the 0.5% transaction

        • Evolução do modelo de ambientes: Dev, Homologação e Produção com pacotes versionados

          Hoje o Zoho CRM já oferece Sandbox, o que é um avanço importante para organizações que trabalham com customizações mais complexas. No entanto, na prática, o modelo atual ainda apresenta limitações significativas quando múltiplas equipes ou consultorias

        • Permissões granulares por usuário além do modelo baseado exclusivamente em perfis

          Atualmente, o modelo de segurança do Zoho CRM é fortemente baseado em perfis. Embora funcional, esse modelo apresenta limitações quando equipes possuem variações individuais de acesso dentro do mesmo grupo operacional. Em cenários reais, é comum que usuários

        • Add or update lookup field values during Blueprint transition

          Hello everyone, During blueprint transition users can add or modify the value of a lookup field. For instance, if the Tickets module includes a lookup field that connects it to records in the Assets module, agents can link the ticket to the correct asset

        • Can you limit SEO penalties by delaying the appearance of a pop-up?

          Google is not keen on pop-ups and has got even less keen on them with the new Core Web Vitals updates. But I like using pop-ups. If you delay the pop-up so it only appears 10 seconds after the page loads, do you avoid Google’s penalties? 

        • Adding bank details to the contact through API

          How to add bank-related information to the contact while creating it using API? The account number needs to be encrypted before sending it through API but not sure how to encrypt and get those values. Please guide me in this.

        • Restrict Payment Methods

          Allow us to restrict certain payment methods specific for each customer.

        • Clone Banking Transaction

          Why is there no option to CLONE a Transaction in the Banking module?? I often clone Expenses (for similar expense transactions each month) so I would also like to clone Income transactions. But there is no option in Banking to clone an existing Income

        • PDF limit

          Hello everyone, We have received an e-mail that we have reached our PDF limit. (see screenshot) However, I cannot find any reference to a PDF limit in our tariff plan (Premium). (see screenshot). What is the maximum number of PDFs that can be generated

        • How can I see content of system generated mails from zBooks?

          System generated mails for offers or invices appear in the mail tab of the designated customer. How can I view the content? It also doesn't appear in zMail sent folder.

        • Credit Card Pre-Authorization with later Capture/Settlement

          We really enjoy the convenience of being able to pay off a customer's invoice using our Auth.Net integration with Zoho Books. Unfortunately, we can only take advantage of this feature with a small percentage of our customers as it leaves a gaping hole

        • Zoho Projects and CRM Integration in Analytics

          Hi Team, In Zoho CRM, I’ve integrated CRM with Zoho Projects and associated a project within the CRM. The integration is visible under the Deals module. However, I’m unable to find this data in Zoho Analytics. Does anyone know where this information is

        • Next Page