Automatic collection and dunning

Learn about the automatic collection features of Stripe Invoicing and how to configure them.

Stripe provides a number of automated recovery features to help collect payments that may have otherwise been unsuccessful—including automatically updating your users’ saved cards, sending emails when a failed payment occurs, and retrying cards at strategic times.

Smarter saved cards

Saved card details can continue to work even if the physical card has been replaced by the issuing bank. Stripe works with card networks and automatically attempts to update saved card details whenever a customer receives a new card. Automatic card updates require card issuers to participate with the network and provide this information. It’s widely supported in the United States, allowing Stripe to automatically update most American Express, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cards issued there. International support varies from country to country. It’s not possible to identify which cards Stripe can automatically update.

Failed payment emails

Stripe’s failed payment emails allow you to send an email to your user when a card payment for an invoice fails. You can customize the colors and logo on these emails to fit with the design and branding of your business.

Smart Retries

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

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

Stripe then uses this information to intelligently assess when to retry payments, based on a combination of these factors. Stripe continuously learns from new purchaser behaviors and transactions. This provides for a more flexible and responsive approach over traditional rules-based payment retry logic. Any invoice with auto_advance set to true goes through the Smart Retries flow (if enabled), regardless of the selected payment method.

The Smart Retries feature attempts to retry the customer’s charge up to four times within a customizable period and works for cards and any other pull-based payment methods. To avoid bank fees, Stripe doesn’t retry invoice payments made with ACH debit, BECS debit, or SEPA debit.

Configuring automatic collection settings

Managing failed payments

Retry schedule

The Smart Retries feature attempts to retry the customer’s charge up to four times within a customizable timeframe. You can override this behavior by disabling Smart Retries and defining your own custom retry rules. When dunning is enabled, the next_payment_attempt attribute on the invoice.payment_failed webhook indicates when the next collection attempt will occur.

Emails

When enabled, Stripe emails your customer to notify them of a failed payment attempt, including the amount and card used. You can customize this email to link back to your website so your customer can update billing details.

Updating the invoice status for failed automatic collections

You can configure what happens to an invoice after all retry attempts have been exhausted.

Payments that require 3D Secure

3D Secure emails

When your 3D Secure settings are configured to enable the Send a Stripe-hosted link for cardholders to authenticate when required option, your customers receive emails when charging their card on file requires them to complete 3D Secure authentication. This only applies when the payment attempt occurs and the customer isn’t present (payments made after the first billing period). It links to a Stripe-hosted page where they can confirm the payment.

3D Secure provides a layer of protection against fraudulent payments that’s supported by most card issuers. Unlike regular card payments, 3D Secure requires cardholders to complete an additional verification step with the issuer. Typically, this involves showing the customer an authentication page on their bank’s website, where they’re prompted to enter a password associated with the card or a verification code sent to their phone. This process is familiar to customers through the card networks’ brand names, such as Visa Secure and Mastercard Identity Check.

You can also enable reminder emails, along with a schedule of your choosing, by enabling the Send reminders if 3D Secure isn’t completed option. When enabled, this notifies your customer of an incomplete 3D Secure payment, prompting them to confirm their payment on a Stripe-hosted page.

Updating the invoice status for failed automatic collections

You can configure what happens to an invoice after all 3D Secure reminder attempts have been exhausted.

Invoices sent to customer

These settings only affect invoices where the collection_method is set to send_invoice.

Emails

When sending invoices to your customers, Stripe can also send your customers payment reminders on a predefined schedule. Reminders include payment instructions and a copy of the original invoice.

Updating the invoice status for failed automatic collections

You can configure what happens to an invoice when the invoice ages past a maximum number of days after its due date.

Accepting partially paid invoices

When the Automatically reconcile partial payments that meet a minimum option is enabled 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 and marks the invoice as paid.