Dunning Management

Dunning management relates to managing the complications of payment declines, and when a collection attempt fails, the options available to help you collect this debt.    

Stax Bill allows you to set up dunning rules, which control the actions taken upon a credit card collection failure.  The options available to help you collect include: 

• Automated retry attempts on failures
• Automated communications
• Automated changes to a customer’s status.

Automated Retry Attempt on Failures

If a collection fails, we will automatically retry to collect after a period of time.  Our default collection attempts are Day 1, Day 3 and Day 5.

Retry attempts can be customized on a per-account basis and can be configured to try more frequently and for longer periods.

Note: If your gateway is Stax, Stax Payments has a special process that attempts to update create card information such as expiry dates. This Account Updater usually runs twice a month. It would be advisable to set retries on the 15th or the 26th to increase the likelihood of successful payment.

Automated Communications – Email Notifications

When a collection attempt fails, specific Email Notifications can be configured to be sent to your customers.  These email notifications are trigger-based and are sent based on the trigger condition being met.  For example, if configured, the Failed Payment Notification would be sent upon a failed collection attempt.  The email notification would be sent to the primary email address for that customer.  Optionally, you can configure all email notifications to send a copy internally to one or many email addresses.

Automated Changes to a Customer’s Status

The two main actions that control automated changes to a customer’s status are:

• Accounting Status*  changes to Poor Standing
  • Accounting statuses include Good, Poor Standing and Collections
    • Poor Standing is caused by an invoice moving into an Overdue status
      • Failed credit card attempts automatically move a customer into Poor Standing as their invoice is now in an Overdue status.
• Grace Period is met
  • Grace Period is a default Account setting that determines the number of days a customer remains in an Active state when they have overdue invoices and are in Poor Standing.  Once the default number of days is reached, the customer is automatically moved into a Suspended state.

 Dunning Process

As mentioned above, every customer in Stax Bill has two levels of status that relate to their account health.  Service status relates to the state of their account and accounting status, which informs you if the customer has any overdue invoices or failed credit card payments.  Both the service and accounting statuses are displayed on the main customer grid, providing easy insight into customer statuses.  An added piece of data in the grid is the Days Until Suspension, which reflects the Grace Period (number of days before the customer will be automatically moved to a Suspended state).  

The example below outlines the different actions a customer may experience when you cannot collect a payment, and their invoice is moved to an Overdue status.   This will include attempts and notifications if configured.

Note: The example below is based on the Grace Period being set to 5 days and Collection Attempts on Days 1,3 and 5.

Configuring your Dunning Management rules is normally handled during implementation, but you can make changes as needed to your configuration. 

To view or edit your dunning configuration, navigate to Settings > Collections > Dunning Management.