Collection follow-up and recovery
Investigate unpaid invoices and configure recurring collection recovery.
Start with the invoice's outstanding balance and actual attempts. A failed attempt, a pending payment and an exhausted recovery sequence require different actions.
Investigate a collection
You need access to view invoices and subscriptions, and additional management access for mutations or settings.
- Open Collections → Invoices and find the customer or invoice.
- Open the detail and compare its state, paid amount and outstanding balance.
- Review the collection panel, payment attempts and activity: last result, failure reason and next attempt when scheduled.
- For recurring billing, open the related subscription and review its method and state.
- Choose the available action based on the result, then check the invoice again.
For a payment still processing, follow the existing instructions and wait for a final result. For a failed collection, resolve the payment-method problem and use Charge invoice when available. To collect through the customer, share a payable invoice or portal link. For money already received elsewhere, record an external payment instead of charging again.
Configure recurring recovery
Open Settings → Subscriptions to review and save:
- Up to three retry intervals. Each interval is measured after the previous attempt, not as an absolute day from the first failure.
- The terminal outcome after automatic recovery: unpaid or canceled.
- The initial invoice expiry in hours.
- The grace period for invoice-based collection in days.
These are account settings, not a guarantee that every payment method retries identically. Review the actual next attempt and result on the invoice. Changing settings does not turn a pending payment into a success.
Read the recurring collection matrix
Open Metrics → Recurring Collections. Select the period and filters, then open a cell to inspect the invoices behind it. The detail includes collected, outstanding and refunded amounts, attempts, the last attempt and the next attempt when available.
Follow an invoice from the matrix to investigate or act on it. Keep currencies separate when comparing amounts. Refunded amounts and outstanding amounts answer different questions; a period total alone does not explain a particular customer's debt.
Verify recovery
Confirm the recorded paid and outstanding amounts and the final invoice and subscription states. An email sent, a new saved card or a browser redirect does not prove collection. Integrations should use the verified Collections Webhooks for authoritative purchase fulfillment.
Troubleshooting
- No next attempt: recovery may be exhausted, disabled or unavailable for the current state. Review policy and invoice history.
- Retry unavailable: inspect pending payment and invoice closure before trying another route.
- Customer needs a new method: use the portal or another supported method-saving flow, then review collection separately.
- Metric differs from expectation: open the underlying cell, review period, currency and invoice balances rather than adding unrelated totals.