Automatic collection

Stripe provides a number of automated revenue recovery features for one-off invoices to help collect payments that might have failed otherwise. These include automatically updating your users’ saved cards, sending emails when a failed payment occurs, and retrying cards at strategic times.

Smart Retries

Using machine learning, Smart Retries chooses the best times to retry failed payment attempts to increase the chance of successfully paying an invoice. The machine learning system behind Smart Retries uses time-dependent, dynamic signals, such as:

• The number of different devices that have presented a given payment method in the last N hours.
• The best time to pay (payments made for debit cards in certain countries might be slightly more successful at 12:01 AM in local time zones).

Based on a combination of these factors, Stripe intelligently assesses when to retry payments. We continuously learn from new purchaser behaviours and transactions, which provide for a more targeted approach over traditional rules-based payment retry logic. Any invoice with the auto_advance attribute set to true goes through the Smart Retries flow (if enabled), regardless of the selected payment method.

Smart Retries reattempts the charge according to your specifications for the number of retries and the maximum duration. You can also use automations to create different retry policies for different customer segments.

You can override this behaviour by disabling Smart Retries and defining your own custom retry rules. When you enable dunning, the next_payment_attempt attribute on the invoice.payment_failed webhook indicates when Stripe attempts the next collection.

Failed payment notifications

In the Subscriptions and emails tab of your billing settings, scroll to the Manage failed payments for subscriptions section. The setting Send emails when card payments fail turns on automatic customer emails for failed payments.

If a payment failure occurs on a one-off invoice and Link to a Stripe-hosted page is selected, Stripe sends a link to the Hosted Invoice Page to the customer.

You can customise the colour, icon, and logo of your customer emails and Stripe-hosted page in the Branding settings.

Customise the email message Beta

For failed payment emails, you can write your own email message to your customers instead of using the default email message. You’ll also need to use a verified custom domain to send emails from.

1. Click the customise link in the sentence below the Send emails to customers to update failed card payment methods option.

2. Choose the Use your own custom email option.

3. Read the email policy guidelines. By law, you can’t add promotional content without explicit consent from the customer.

4. Fill out the contents of the email. As you enter information, you can see a preview of the email.

Manage invoices sent to customers

In the Subscriptions and emails tab of your billing settings, scroll to the Manage invoices sent to customers section to:

• Email finalised invoices to customers – You can turn this option on to always email your customers a finalised invoice. This setting only affects invoices where the collection_method is set to send_invoice.
• Change an overdue invoice’s status – You can mark an invoice as uncollectible if it’s overdue by 30, 60, or 90 days. You can also leave the invoice overdue.
• Automatically reconcile partial payments that meet a minimum – You can instruct Stripe to mark an invoice as paid if it’s partially paid within the set amount. For example, if the payment received from your customer is within 20 USD or less of the total (or at whatever amount you configure), then this setting applies a credit to the invoice for the outstanding amount. It then marks the invoice as paid.

Automatic reminders for one-off invoices

To turn on automatic reminders for unpaid, one-off invoices, navigate to the Invoices tab of your billing settings, scroll to the Manage advanced invoicing features section, and turn on Send reminders if a one-off invoice hasn’t been paid. For each reminder you want to send, click Add reminder and select a schedule from the dropdown list. You can schedule reminders for before, on, or after the invoice due date.