Process suspended subscriptions
Process an order that has failed with a hard decline or after retries
An order with recurring payments has a Suspended
status if the most recent payment was declined with a hard-decline reason code. Hard declines are caused by a permanent condition affecting the card, such as the account being closed, so you cannot retry these payments.
In the Orders list, a Suspended
order is marked with a dark grey square inside a circle. To display Suspended
subscription orders, in the Orders list, in Filters, for the Status, select Suspended
and make the filter active.

Suspended orders in the orders list
Status flow for suspended subscriptions
When an order is Suspended
, BillPro does not try to collect any billing events. To restore the order to the Active
status, you must contact the customer to update their card. When you reactivate a Suspended
subscription, BillPro immediately collects the declined billing event.
BillPro can also automatically suspend a subscription if all the automatic retries of a billing event fail with a soft-decline response. See Auto-retry billing eventsand Auto-suspend subscriptions in Get set up in BillPro. In this case, the billing event will have a soft-decline status, but because the order is suspended, you must update the card to activate the order.
To cancel a subscription, mark the order as Complete
. See Mark an order as complete.
The following diagram shows the workflows for processing suspended subscriptions in BillPro.

Status flow for suspended orders
Manage suspended subscriptions
To manage suspended subscription orders, do these steps.
- To find out more about why the order was suspended
- In the Order Summary, check for a notification, such as
The credit card added to this order has expired
. If not, check the Related transactions section. Failed billing events are marked with a red flag.
- In the Order Summary, check for a notification, such as

Display the related transactions for a suspended order
-
For more details of why a payment was hard-declined, click on the TRANSACTION UNIQUE ID. The Transaction Details pop-up. For full details of how to interpret the details of declined transactions in this pop-up, see Display related transactions for an order - Declined transactions.
- For example, for Mastercard, it displays the Merchant Advice Code.
A hard declined Mastercard transaction
- And for example, for an expired card, the gateway declines the transaction, and it displays a result code of
100.100.303
.
A transaction that was hard declined due to an expired card
-
To update the customer's card, do these steps. This will immediately collect a declined billing event, but if you want to collect it at a different time or not collect it at all, see Manage billing events.
-
In the Order Summary, go to the gear options menu, and select Cards. The Registered Cards pop-up opens.
-
From here you can:
- Select another card.
- Update the customer's card details over the phone.
Register a new card and charge the last failed billing event
- Send the customer a link to update their card details.
-
When you add a card to a suspended subscription, BillPro automatically charges the declined billing event.
After you add the card, if the payment is approved, the order becomes Active
.
Updated 17 days ago
Learn more about managing billing events and subscription orders