Auto-retry billing events

BillPro Customer Service can configure your merchant with an option to automatically retry billing events that fail with a soft decline, and set the days on which the retries will occur.

By default, after a payment is rejected with a soft-decline, it is possible that the issue could resolve without you contacting the customer. For example, if the customer's account has insufficient funds, the customer could add more money to the account. You can retry a soft-declined transaction up to 15 times within 30 days.

By default, the automatic retries will take place on days 1, 2, and 3 after the scheduled collection date of the soft-declined billing event. When BillPro has consumed all the automatic retries, it will deactivate the auto-retry functionality.

When automatic retries are running, you can still contact your customer, and try to collect the payment over the phone or using a payment link. Manual retries do not affect the automatic retries. If the payment is approved (or hard declined), then BillPro stops the automatic retries.

When BillPro retries a billing event, it has the same SPID (scheduled payment identifier) as the original billing event. But each transaction has its own TRANSACTION UNIQUE ID from the payment gateway. To display the Transaction Details including the response from the payment gateway and the acquirer, click on the TRANSACTION UNIQUE ID.

For declined payments, BillPro displays details of automatic retries in the Billing Exceptions view. See Monitor billing exceptions. BillPro does not include automatic retries in the dashboard or reports of projected payments.

If you reschedule a billing event to process it early, and it fails, the automatic retries start after the original scheduled date of the billing event. The following diagram shows the automatic retries of a billing event.

BillPro can automatically suspend a subscription after it has consumed the automatic retries. See Auto-suspend subscriptions at Get set up in BillPro. If auto-suspend is ON and the auto-retries are consumed for a subscription, the order has a Suspended state. If auto-suspend is OFF, and the auto-retries are consumed, the order has a failed state.