HR & Finance / 03 of 04
Failed Payment Systems
Pings your team to collect a failed payment from a client the moment it happens
How it runs
Trigger
Stripe payment fails
Step 01
Resolve the client record
Step 02
Alert a named owner, not a channel
Step 03
Chase ladder: days 0, 2, 5, 9
Escalates
Message firmer at each step
Recovered
Log it and clear the flag
Unrecovered
Flag churn risk, pause delivery
What it is
A failed charge alerts a named person immediately and starts an escalating chase, then either clears or gets flagged as a churn signal.
You need this if failed payments surface in a monthly reconciliation, giving the client a month of free delivery and yourself a month of not knowing.
In most subscription businesses, involuntary churn from expired cards is a bigger leak than voluntary churn.
If you already chase failures, the value is the terminal: an unrecovered payment is a retention event, so it belongs on the churn board.
The actual build
What it does for you
Revenue you've already earned gets recovered
which is the highest-margin money in the business.
Involuntary churn from expired cards and changed banks gets caught before it silently becomes real churn
An unrecovered payment routes to the churn board
so a billing problem gets treated as the relationship problem it is.
Built and running
School of Bots
LiveWith first-payment notifications into Slack with client lookup, plus an active Stripe dispute tracker.
Want this one built into your business?
Thirty minutes, no deck. We map what you run today and tell you what it would take.