Past-due & dunning

A subscription enters past_due when an automatic renewal charge fails. Genius Checkout retries on a fixed schedule before giving up — this page explains what's happening, what the buyer sees, and what you should do.

Why renewals fail

The most common reasons, in rough order of frequency:

• Insufficient funds — card declined for amount. The buyer needs to top up or use a different card.
• Expired card — the saved card has passed its expiry date. Buyer must update their card.
• Card cancelled / replaced — buyer's bank reissued the card; old token no longer valid.
• SCA required — issuer wants 3DS re-authentication for this MIT charge. The standard retry loop is skipped for SCA failures because re-charging the same card with the same merchant-initiated path won't change the outcome. The subscription stays past_due until a buyer-facing re-auth flow is available (Phase 2).
• Issuer fraud block — the bank flagged the renewal. Resolution requires the buyer contacting their bank.

Retry schedule

When a charge fails, the system records dunning_attempts = 1 and schedules a retry. The cadence is:

Attempt #	Retried after	Cumulative time since first failure
1 (the original failure)	—	0
2	1 day	1 day
3	3 days	4 days
4	7 days	11 days
Give up	no further retry	—

After the fourth failure the subscription stays past_due indefinitely — it does not auto-cancel. You can cancel it manually from the detail page or wait for the buyer to update their card.

If any retry succeeds, dunning_attempts resets to 0 and the subscription returns to active.

What the buyer experiences

• First failure — the buyer receives the past-due notification email (subject + content depend on your notification preferences).
• Subsequent retries — silent — no further email until status changes again.
• Recovery — when a retry succeeds, the next renewal proceeds on the original schedule. No make-up charge is issued for the skipped period unless you do it manually.

Cards expiring soon

Genius Checkout sends a "card about to expire" reminder a few days before the listed expiry date so the buyer can update before a real failure happens. This pre-dunning step typically catches the majority of would-be expiry failures.

Where past-due alerts appear in the portal

• Subscriptions list — Past due red badge on the row.
• Filter dropdown — pick Past Due to see only affected subscriptions.
• Detail page — the Details grid shows Dunning attempts: 1, 2, 3, or 4.
• Event timeline — every charge_failed event is logged with timestamp and failure reason.
• Dashboard — past-due totals appear in the alerts widget.

What you should do

Situation	Recommended action
past_due, attempts = 1	Wait — the retry loop will probably recover it within a week.
past_due, attempts = 4 (terminal)	Contact the buyer asking them to update their card.
Many past-due subs at once	Check the Gateways page — a credential issue or gateway outage can cause batch failures.
Past-due with reason "SCA required"	Manually reach out to the buyer; the standard retry won't help here.

Next steps

• Subscription Lifecycle — cancel, pause, swap card
• Decline Codes — developer-facing reference for every failure reason