What Happens if a Recurring Charge Fails?

It’s never ideal when a donor’s recurring payment fails to process, for you or the donor. With Virtuous Payments, there are some cases where the transaction will automatically retry multiple times while there are also some failure codes that will not automatically retry. In either case, you’re able to set up notifications for both your team and the donor of the charge fails for any reason. 

Table of Contents

1. Recurring Gift Error Codes Which Are Retried Automatically

2. How Many Times Does Payments Retry the Charge?

3. Recurring Gift Error Codes Which Are Not Retried Automatically

4. How do I Know Why the Transaction Failed?

5. Investigating a Failed Recurring Charge

Recurring Gift Error Codes Which Are Retried Automatically

If a recurring charge attempt comes back with any of the following error codes listed below, the charge will be automatically retried following the retry logic described below.

• Generic Decline Bank: Declined with generic error, typically due to a fraudulent check
• Insufficient Funds: Insufficient funds in account
• Limit Exceeded: The vendor has blocked any future payments after too many charges.
• Payment Provider Failure: The payment provider could not be reached or returned an unexpected response.
• Unknown: We are not accounting for this error. Please check the error description for more details.

How Many Times Does Payments Retry the Charge?

If the failed charge can be retried, Virtuous Payments will attempt multiple retries before the schedule is paused. Payments provides three initial (micro) retries in a row for the first failed payment. If these fail, the gift is then retried for the following two months (macro).

For example, if there is a monthly gift set to charge on June 1st that fails, it will look like this:

Initial charge: June 1st - payment fails (initial attempt). 

• Retry: June 2nd - payment fails (retry #1)
• Retry: June 3rd - payment fails (retry #2)
• Retry: June 4th - payment fails (retry #3)

Macro retry attempt #1 (Because this is a monthly schedule, it will repeat the process the following month-July).

July 1st, it fails (initial attempt). 

• Retry: July 2nd - payment fails (retry #1)
• Retry: July 3rd -payment fails (retry #2)
• Retry: July 4th -payment fails (retry #3)

Macro retry attempt #2 (Because this is a monthly schedule, it will repeat the processing the following month-August).

August 1st, it fails (initial attempt). 

• Retry: August 2nd - payment fails (retry #1)
• Retry: August 3rd -payment fails (retry #2)
• Retry: August 4th -payment fails (retry #3)

At this point, there have been a total of 12 tries to process the charge all failing, and the schedule is paused.

Recurring Gift Error Codes Which Are Not Retried Automatically

If a recurring charge attempt comes back with any one of the following error codes listed below, it will NOT be retried automatically with the attempts above. The schedule will pause indefinitely until the payment tender is updated or issue is resolved. Once updated, the schedule will retry a charge on the next charge date.

• Lost or Stolen: The card has been marked lost or stolen
• Expired: The account or card has expired.
• Invalid Details: Incorrect CVV, expiration, name on card or card/account numbers.
• Failed AVS: The payment provider had an issue validating the Address Verification Service for a credit card.
• Blocked: The payment was blocked by the bank or credit source.
• Does not exist: The specified payment method does not exist. This typically means you're using a payment method from one merchant to another.
• Invalid Configuration: The app fee is incorrect
• Max Transaction Total Exceeded:  The payment total was greater than the max limit.

How Do I Know Why the Transaction Failed?

Within Raise Donors, your failed Recurring Gifts will have an Error status listed on the recurring giving page. 

You can also go into Settings, then Notifications to set up notifications for a team member when recurring donations fail.

Investigating a Failed Recurring Charge

Once you've identified that a recurring charge has failed, you may want to investigate why the charge failed for follow-up conversations with the donor. To access that information, you will need to access your Stripe Dashboard. You should have your own login for Stripe, but you can find a link to access via Settings > Payment Providers >Select Payment Provider > Open Payment Provider Dashboard.

Once you've logged into Stripe, you will be able to filter to find your failed transactions and the reason for the failure.