Process failed orders

An order is Failed when a recurring payment is soft-declined: a temporary problem with the card, such as insufficient funds. BillPro keeps trying to collect the scheduled billing events.

To list failed orders, open Orders, click Filters, select Status › Failed, and click Apply. The Failed card at the top of the list also shows how many there are.

Status flow for failed orders

The card schemes let you retry a soft-declined billing event up to 15 times within 30 days. That includes your manual retries and BillPro's automatic retries.

• If a retry or a later billing event is approved, the order becomes Active again. An instalment order can be Active and still have earlier declined payments.
• If a billing event or retry is hard-declined, the order becomes Suspended.
• A subscription also becomes Suspended when its automatic retries are used up and auto-suspend is on.

flowchart LR
  Active -->|Soft decline| Failed
  Failed -->|"Retry or next
  payment approved"| Active
  Failed -->|Hard decline| Suspended
  Failed -->|"Subscription: retries
  used up, auto-suspend on"| Suspended
  Active -->|"All paid, or
  Mark as Complete"| Complete

Manage a failed order

1. Open the order and click the Billing Events tab.

2. Find the soft-declined billing event: it has a red cross in Status, and Retry Count shows how many times it was retried. Expand it to see each declined attempt.

   

3. For the reason, click a Transaction Unique ID. See Declined transactions. The Order Logs tab has more detail.

4. Contact the customer so they can fix the problem, such as adding funds.

5. Select the billing event and choose an action. See Manage billing events.

   • Retry: charge it again now. This is usually the best first step.
   • Reschedule: move it to a later date, and change the amount if needed.
   • Merge: select several billing events to combine them into one.
   • Skip: don't collect it.

   

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Manage billing events before you change the card

When you add a card to a failed order, BillPro charges every declined and overdue billing event straight away, merged into one payment. Retry, reschedule or skip them first if you don't want that. See Update cards.