What if a Payment Fails?

It doesn’t happen very often, but every now and again a Direct Debit payment is bound to fail. More often than not, the reason is due to insufficient funds, but lets look at what actually happens within CROSSMEMBER.

Payments can fail for one of four reasons, these are:

Cancelled: the payment has been cancelled

Customer approval denied: the customer has denied approval for the payment. You should contact the customer directly

Failed: the payment failed to be processed. Note that payments can fail after being confirmed if the failure message is sent late by the banks.

Charged Back: the payment has been charged back (usually after it has been paid out to the Club).

The notification of a cancelled payment is made within your Activity List. Let’s look at one example.

If a payment fails due to insufficient funds (the most common occurrence) then we are allowed to retry the payment up to three times. CROSSMEMBER will do this task for you automatically – and email the member concerned to tell them that the payment failed, why, and that the payment is being retried.

This is what your Activity List looks like – Please note, that for this example, we have failed the payment four times in succession (three retries) so that you can see what has happened.

Normally there would be several days in between each of these these failures, but this is just to serve as an example.

Notice that on each failure, you are notified that the payment is being retried, and then upon the final failure, there is a Payment Failed event. From here, you can decide what you would like to do.

Let’s click through to member 126 and view their membership record.

This is the header section of Fred Bloggs’ membership record (administrator view). Note that this is a Direct Debit member that is showing as overdue, and the next payment is next year! We know that the payment was retried and failed, so we need to look at Fred’s membership history, here’s what it looks like.

We can see here that the ‘Current’ membership has reverted back to the previous overdue period and the Direct Debit payment has been revoked. The comment also tells you why the payment failed so that you can decide what to do. The Direct Debit subscription will continue to work next year, but you need to contact the member and request payment by other means.

Note: The member will not be able to renew themselves by any of the other methods due to the Direct Debit being established. It would be best to arrange for another payment method this time – perhaps by bank transfer.

All payment failures will follow this procedure, but only insufficient funds will result in the payment being retried.