Dunning Management for Credit Cards

Dunning management relates to the process for managing the complications of credit card payment declines, and when a collection attempt fails, the options available to help you collect this debt.    

Fusebill provides you the ability to set up Dunning Rules, which control the actions taken upon a credit card collection failure.  The options available to help you collect include:

• Automated retry attempts on failures
• Automated communications
• Automated changes to a customer’s status.

Automated Retry Attempt on Failures

If a credit card collections fails, we will automatically retry to collect on the credit card after a period of time.  Our default collection attempts are: Day 1, Day 3 and Day 5.

Retry Attempts can be customized on per Account basis and can be configured to try more frequently and for longer periods.

Automated Communications – Email Notifications

When a credit card collection attempt fails, there are specific Email Notifications that can be configured to be sent to your customers.  These email notifications are trigger based and are sent based on the trigger condition being met.  For example, the Failed Payment Notification, if configured, would be sent upon a credit card collection attempt failing.  The email notification would be sent to the Primary Email address for that customer.  Optionally you can configure all Email Notifications to send a copy internally to one or many email addresses.

Automated Changes to a Customer’s Status

The two main actions that control automated changes to a customer’s status are:

• Accounting Status*  changes to PoorStanding
  • Accounting statuses include Good, PoorStanding and Collections
    • PoorStanding is caused by an invoice moving into an Overdue status
      • Failed credit card attempts automatically move a customer into PoorStanding as their invoice is now in an Overdue status.
• Grace Period is met
  • Grace Period is a default Account setting that determines the number of days a customer remains in an Activestate when they have overdue invoices and are in PoorStanding.  Once the default number of days are reached, the customer is automatically moved into a Suspended state

 Dunning Process

As mentioned above, every customer in Fusebill has two levels of statuses that relate to the health of their account.  Service Status which relates to the state of their account and Accounting Status which informs you if the customer has any overdue invoices or failed credit card payments.  Both the Service Status and Accounting Statuses are displayed on the main Customer Grid, providing you easy insight into customer statuses.  An added piece of data included in the grid is the Days Until Suspension, which reflects the Grace Period (number of days before the customer will be automatically moved to a Suspended state).   The different statuses that appear for customers are also colour coded (green, red, grey, black).   Ideally, you want both the Service Status and Accounting Status to be green.  Any combination of Green, Red, Black and/or Grey means there are issues with that customer account. 

The Customer Grid below shows the following: 

• 1 customer in good standing (all green)
• 1 customer in PoorStanding with 17 days left in their grace period (green and red)
• 1 customer in a suspended mode (red and red)

The example below outlines the different actions a customer may experience when you are unable to collect payment via the customer’s stored Credit Card and their invoice is moved to an Overdue status.   This will include attempts and notifications if configured.

Note:   Example below is based on the Grace Period being set to 5 days and Collection Attempts on Day 1,3 and 5.

Configuring your Dunning Management rules is normally handled during implementation but you are able to make changes as needed to your configuration.  To modify your current Dunning Management configuration, contact the Fusebill Support team (support@fusebill.com). 

Other documents that will provide additional insight into Dunning Management include Status Messages and Email Messages.