Understanding failed SEPA payment fees in your payment report
When a SEPA direct debit from one of your members fails (insufficient funds, invalid mandate, account to verify, etc.), your bsport contract includes a €7.50 fee per failed payment. This guide explains how to spot this fee in your payment report, the delay before it shows up, which attempts appear in your report, and how our automatic retry system works.
Failed payments only appear in the Payment report. They will only appear for failed SEPA payments.
⏱️ About a 1-hour delay before it appears
The fee linked to a failed payment is calculated roughly 1 hour after the failed debit. So it's normal for a payment that just failed not to show up in your report right away. Give it a little time before checking the corresponding line.
Which payment attempts appear in your report
Your payment report only reflects real debit attempts — cases where we actually tried to collect the payment from your member's bank. Whether that attempt succeeds or fails, it shows up as a line in your report.
Two situations are not real debit attempts, so they never appear in your payment report and never generate a fee:
No valid SEPA mandate yet: your member hasn't completed (or has revoked) their SEPA mandate, so no debit was ever sent to the bank.
Blocked by our fraud-prevention checks: the attempt was automatically stopped before it reached the bank, for security reasons.
These two cases stay fully invisible in the studio-facing report, however they will appear as failed payments in the invoice payment history.
How to spot a failed SEPA payment
While a SEPA direct debit is pending validation, it doesn't appear in your payment report — exactly as today. Once a real debit attempt is definitively successful or failed, a line appears, showing:
The payment method (SEPA)
The payment amount
The payment fees
It can be payment fees for successful payments, failed payments fees or dispute fees
The Transfer ID
Failed payment will have Failed indicated in the column Payment status.
⚠️ To get your exact totals when reconciling, filter out the lines with Failed status. If not, you will count payments that were not received.
The role of automatic retries (Smart Retries)
To avoid charging you fees on retry attempts that had no real chance of succeeding anyway, bsport doesn't automatically retry every failed SEPA debit. We only retry a real debit attempt, and only for specific failure reasons:
We do retry when the reason is:
Insufficient funds — there wasn't enough money in the account at the time of the debit.
Refer to customer — the bank flagged an issue that the account holder needs to sort out directly with their bank.
Debit disputed — the account holder contested the direct debit.
Bank account restricted — the account currently has restrictions preventing debits.
These are the reasons most likely to resolve on their own, so a second attempt has a real chance of succeeding.
We don't retry when:
There's no valid mandate, or the attempt is blocked by our fraud-prevention checks — as covered above, these aren't real debit attempts, so there's nothing to retry, and no fee applies.
The failure reason isn't one of the four listed above (for example, an account that's been closed) — in this case the attempt still shows up in your report as Failed with the fee applied, but we won't attempt it again automatically, since a retry would be very unlikely to succeed.
On top of the reason-based filtering, the number of retries is also capped: beyond the first retry, success rates drop sharply, so we don't multiply pointless attempts even for a retriable reason.
This logic protects you directly: it avoids piling up failure fees on attempts that were unlikely to succeed anyway.
What about your member's invoice?
When a debit fails, the invoice tied to that payment stays with a Unpaid status in your interface. You keep full control over that invoice: you can follow up with your member, update their payment method, or manage it however works best for you.
For any questions about failed payment fees, feel free to reach out to your bsport contact or our support team.