What Is Dunning, and How the Dunning Process Works

Dunning is what you do between a failed payment and a lost customer. In a subscription business, most failed renewals come from customers who never decided to leave: the card expired, the account was short that day, the bank said no. A good dunning process gets those payments back without annoying anyone, and knows when to stop. For supplement and skincare brands: failed payments for supplement brands and failed payments for skincare brands.

What is dunning?

Dunning is the process of collecting a payment that failed or is overdue, through a set sequence of retries and reminders. The word comes from the old English verb "to dun", to press someone for payment. It is used in two different contexts, and search results mix them up:

In subscriptions, dunning fights involuntary churn: customers lost because a payment failed, not because they canceled. Why renewals fail in the first place (decline codes, expired cards, insufficient funds) is covered in subscription payment failures. This guide picks up once the payment has failed, or is about to.

The dunning process, step by step

A complete dunning process has five stages. The first one happens before anything fails.

1. Pre-dunning. Warn the customer before a payment is likely to fail: card about to expire, trial ending, annual renewal coming up.
2. Failure notice. As soon as the renewal is declined, tell the customer and give them a link to fix it.
3. Retries and reminders. Retry the card on a schedule the card networks allow, and send reminders that get more specific over time.
4. Grace period. Decide how long the customer keeps access, or keeps receiving orders, while the payment is open.
5. Final outcome. If nothing works, apply the rule you chose in advance: pause, cancel, leave the balance open, or write it off.

Pre-dunning: stop failures before they happen

The cheapest failed payment is the one that never fails. Pre-dunning covers the messages and tools that run before the renewal date.

• Expiring card emails. Stripe, for example, can email the customer one month before the default card on file expires.2Stripe Docs, Automate customer emails
• Renewal reminders. A reminder a few days before the charge gives the customer time to switch cards or top up their account. Stripe lets you set how many days before the renewal it goes out.2Stripe Docs, Automate customer emails
• Automatic card updates. Card networks can pass new card details to your processor when a bank replaces a card. Stripe says this is widely supported for cards issued in the United States, and that international support varies by country.7Stripe Docs, How cards work (automatic card updates) Network tokens do the same job: see card account updater and network tokens.
• Trial and promotion endings. For Visa cards this one isn't optional:

A customer who forgets a trial and gets charged doesn't become a dunning case. They become a dispute. The full set of Visa and legal rules for recurring billing is in our guide to negative option billing.

How often to retry a failed payment

Retries do most of the recovery work, because many declines are temporary: the money arrives the next day, the bank's system comes back up. But you can't retry as often as you like. Visa sorts every decline code into four categories, each with a retry limit:6Visa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules, April 18, 2026

Visa also forbids changing data in the request to get a different answer on the retry: the acquirer, merchant country, MCC, POS fields and e-commerce indicator must stay as they were.6Visa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules, April 18, 2026 A Category 1 decline needs a new card from the customer, so for those codes dunning is only messages.

How a billing tool applies this. In Stripe Billing, Smart Retries picks the retry times with a model that uses signals such as the best time to pay, and you choose a number of tries within 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 1 month or 2 months. The recommended default is 8 tries within 2 weeks. If you build a custom schedule instead, you get up to three retries, each a set number of days after the previous one.1Stripe Docs, Automate payment retries (Smart Retries)

Stripe doesn't execute retries after hard declines such as lost_card, stolen_card, pickup_card, incorrect_number, transaction_not_allowed or authentication_required. The scheduled attempts still count, but a charge only runs once the customer adds a new payment method.1Stripe Docs, Automate payment retries (Smart Retries)

Bank debits follow their own, much tighter limits. Stripe only retries them for insufficient funds, and only if you turn it on:1Stripe Docs, Automate payment retries (Smart Retries)

For monthly plans, keep the whole sequence shorter than the billing cycle. Recurly's documentation suggests limiting monthly dunning to 27 days to avoid overlapping the next bill in February.9Recurly Docs, Dunning campaigns For the decline codes behind each category, see how to improve your payment acceptance rate.

Dunning emails and SMS: what to send and when

Retries work without the customer. Messages are for everything retries can't fix: an expired or replaced card, a closed account, a payment that needs authentication. Stripe can send an email after each failed payment, with a link to a page where the customer updates their payment method and pays the open invoice.2Stripe Docs, Automate customer emails

The sequence below is a starting point for a monthly physical subscription. Adjust the days to your own retry schedule.

What every message needs:

• Who you are and what failed. Brand name in the sender and subject, the amount, the order or plan.
• One action. A single link to a page where the card can be updated and the open invoice paid. No login if you can avoid it.
• A date. When the next retry runs, and when access or shipments stop.
• A plain reason, or none. "Your bank declined the payment" is enough. Never echo a fraud-related reason such as a lost or stolen card.
• An exit. A link to pause or cancel. A customer who wanted to leave and can't will dispute the charge instead.

Send texts only to customers who agreed to receive them, and keep the update link valid for the whole sequence. In Stripe, the hosted update link stops working when the subscription becomes canceled or unpaid, or when the current renewal period ends.2Stripe Docs, Automate customer emails

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Grace period: what happens to access

The grace period is the time between the failed payment and the moment you cut access or stop shipping. There is no rule on its length: it's a business choice. What the network rules do fix is the retry window above, and your grace period shouldn't be longer than the time you're still trying to collect.

Billing tools model this with subscription statuses. Here is how Stripe defines them:3Stripe Docs, How subscriptions work (subscription statuses)

How to set the grace period by product type:

• Physical subscriptions (boxes, refills). Don't ship an unpaid order. Hold it, say so in the message, and ship the day the payment clears.
• Digital access. Keep access during the retry window: the customer who logs in and sees a "payment failed" banner is the one most likely to fix it.
• Annual plans. The amount is larger and the card is older. Start pre-dunning earlier and allow a longer grace period. Stripe's automation recipes include a custom dunning flow for annual subscribers.10Stripe Docs, Revenue recovery

What to do when dunning ends: pause, cancel or write off

When the last retry fails, something has to happen to the subscription and to the unpaid balance. Pick the rule before you need it. Stripe offers four outcomes after the final retry:1Stripe Docs, Automate payment retries (Smart Retries)

The pause option has conditions in Stripe: only eligible subscriptions on flexible billing mode can pause, and if Stripe can't pause after the final attempt, it cancels instead.4Stripe Docs, Pause subscriptions after payment failure Canceling, by default, also stops automatic collection of all outstanding invoices.3Stripe Docs, How subscriptions work (subscription statuses)

Writing off. The open balance doesn't disappear with the subscription. Most tools let you mark the invoice uncollectible or void it. Recurly, by default, marks the invoice as failed at the end of the dunning cycle and writes it off as bad debt.9Recurly Docs, Dunning campaigns For a single missed box, chasing the debt after the subscription ends usually costs more than it brings back.

Stopping dunning early. Sometimes you want to end the process before it runs its course: the customer opened a dispute, agreed a payment plan, or called support. In Chargebee, a manually stopped invoice is marked Not Paid, the subscription stays active, and dunning can't be restarted for that invoice. When retries simply run out, the status is "Exhausted" and the invoice follows your dunning settings.8Chargebee Docs, Difference between dunning status stopped and exhausted A customer who disputes a renewal is telling you they want out: stop dunning and handle the dispute. Subscription disputes are covered in our guide to chargeback prevention.

How to measure dunning recovery

A dunning process you don't measure drifts. Stripe's revenue recovery dashboard uses four core indicators, all calculated on subscription payment volume:5Stripe Docs, Revenue recovery analytics

Two breakdowns make these numbers useful. Recovered volume by method splits retries, emails and other methods (API charges, third-party emails, in-app flows), so you see which part of the sequence earns its place. Failed volume by decline reason shows the top decline codes, which tells you whether to work on pre-dunning (expired cards) or on retry timing (insufficient funds).5Stripe Docs, Revenue recovery analytics

There is no official benchmark for recovery rates. Card networks don't publish one, and billing vendors each count retries, first payments and trial conversions differently. Track your own rate over time, split by decline reason, plan length and first versus later renewals. To turn recovered payments into churn and revenue figures, see how to calculate churn rate.

Common dunning mistakes

Dunning for B2B invoices, in short

If you also sell on invoice, to retailers or wholesale buyers, dunning looks different. There's no card to retry. The process is a series of reminders that get firmer as the invoice ages: a friendly note before the due date, a reminder shortly after, a firmer notice citing the terms, a formal letter about late fees or a credit hold, and a final demand before an agency or a write-off. Pause reminders while a dispute about the invoice is open. The metric that matters is days sales outstanding (DSO): how long it takes, on average, to turn an invoice into cash.

How Tagada handles dunning

Whatever tool you use, the method doesn't change: warn before the renewal, retry within the network limits, send one clear link, and decide in advance how the sequence ends. If you're comparing tools, our guide to dunning management software lists what to check.