Plug&Pay collects orders in subscriptions or instalment payments automatically. However, it can happen that an order is not paid correctly. For example, that someone does not have enough money in their account and therefore the payment fails. Or that someone reverses the order. You can read what to do here!
Where do you find the failed direct debits?
When you go to your orders overview, you will also see Failed direct debits at the top. In this screen you have an overview of all your failed direct debits.
At Status you will see that the order is unpaid. This can mean that your customer has reversed the direct debit in their online banking environment, or that the payment failed because someone did not have enough money in their account for the direct debit.
What does Plug&Pay do with a failed direct debit?
With a failed direct debit, Plug&Pay will attempt to collect the payment again. In addition, a reminder email will be sent.
Under Settings > Emails > Email templates you can adjust the text of these emails (the template is called 'Failed direct debit'). The reminder emails always contain a payment link, so customers can click directly on the link in the email to pay.
What can you do with a failed direct debit?
When you click on an unpaid order, you will see two buttons: Collect and Reminder.
If you click Collect, a direct debit will be sent to the bank again. This means another attempt will be made to debit the amount. This is possible when no direct debit has yet been executed.
Note: You can only re-collect unpaid orders, not reversed orders. This is because the customer has already manually blocked this payment via the bank.
If you click Reminder, the reminder email will be sent again manually.
You will also find a Payment link with the unpaid and reversed orders:
You can also share this link manually with the customer. If the customer pays via this payment link, the order will automatically be set to 'paid'.
Check the activity (history) of the order
Below the order you will see the heading Activity. Here you can see exactly on which day the direct debit was created and which emails have been sent. Always check this history - it may for example also show a notification from Mollie or Stripe with the reason why the direct debit failed!
View the order in Mollie or Stripe
Below the payment status, you will also see the status of the order in Mollie or Stripe. You can click on this and the transaction will be opened in Mollie or Stripe. Here you can possibly find more information about the failed direct debit.
Cancel the subscription?
The subscription is not automatically cancelled in Plug&Pay after (a number of) unpaid invoices. If the orders really are not being paid and you cannot get in contact with your customer, you could cancel this customer's subscription yourself.
Following up with your customers
If a payment is still outstanding, you can follow up with the customer in 2 ways.
1) Manual follow-up: Here you need to contact the customer yourself. No collection costs are charged when a customer does not pay. The most important thing with non-paying customers is of course to always keep a good conversation going. Why can a customer not pay? Are they short of money? Can you perhaps arrange a payment plan?
2) Automatic follow-up (Ultimate feature): Plug&Pay has a debtor management system. With the debtor management system in Plug&Pay, you can automatically follow up your unpaid invoices. You can send reminders and demands and also automatically add collection costs to the invoice. You can read more information about the debtor management system here: Debtor management system: automatically follow up unpaid invoices
💡 A tip to prevent failed direct debits: Always try to communicate the payment process as clearly as possible to your customers when working with automatic direct debit. We, for example, send multiple emails before the first direct debit to inform our customers that a direct debit is coming. This prevents unwanted surprises!