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Writing off failed invoices
Writing off failed invoices

Handling bad debt and managing subscriptions with failed payments

Updated over a week ago

Invoicing is the crux of running your business and with Billsby keeping track of your payments, managing those invoices is made much easier.

For each payment request, whether it be a sign up or a renewal, we generate an invoice that will keep a status of the payment made. If an invoice is unpaid and you're not expecting to receive payment, you'll want to treat this as a bad debt and write off the invoice - this will set the value of the invoice to 0 and the status will change to Written off.

You can choose whether you want to automatically write off invoices after a certain number of hours and attempts made to collect the payment, or if you'd rather do this yourself, as part of the dunning configuration.

Writing off an invoice using the dunning flow

To automate the writing off of invoices, navigate to Settings > Configuration > Dunning and failed payments. At the bottom of the page you'll see a section called Writing off the invoice. Here, you'll be able to choose whether you want to write off the invoice immediately after the final reattempt, or whether you'd like to schedule this for a number of hours after the final reattempt has been made.

You'll also need to choose what you want to do with the subscription status - keep it active or change it to suspended or cancelled.

Important: Cancelling a subscription updates the customer's status to Inactive, which is irreversible and you won't be able to reactive this customer without creating them as a new customer. This means you'll also need to recollect their payment details and may risk churn.

When the invoice is written off, the subscription status will update automatically according to your chosen configuration.

Writing off an invoice manually

If your dunning settings are configured to write off invoices manually, then all unpaid invoices will remain Unpaid until you go in and write them off yourself. To do this, find the invoice you're looking to update, click through to the invoice and choose Update status in the top left. This will open a side modal where you can update the status to Written off.

Updating the subscription status

When you write off an invoice manually, no update is made to the status of the subscription automatically. You can choose whether you want to allow this customer's subscription to remain active or whether you want to cancel their subscription going forward. If you do nothing, the subscription will remain active.

To cancel a subscription, just navigate to the individual subscription page and choose Cancel subscription in the top right menu and follow the steps to cancel.

If you would rather change the subscription status to Suspended than cancelling it all together, choose Update status in the same menu and you can update to suspended in the side modal.

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