Handling failed payments

Cards decline. Mowzey runs the retry sequence for you. Here's what happens and what you do.

A charge fails when a card is expired, when the bank flags it for fraud, when there are insufficient funds, or for a dozen smaller reasons. Mowzey is built so you don't have to babysit every failure — Stripe retries automatically and the customer gets emailed to fix it. This article walks through the sequence and the few cases where you do need to step in.

What Mowzey does automatically

  1. Sends the customer an email immediately. Subject line is along the lines of "Your payment to [your business] needs attention." The email includes a one-click link to update the card on a Stripe-hosted page.
  2. Retries the charge up to 3 times over the following week. Stripe's smart retry picks times that historically have the highest success rate (often the morning of paydays).
  3. Marks the invoice as overdue if all retries fail. You'll see it in the overdue list on your dashboard and on the customer's profile.
  4. Pauses the subscription (if the failed charge was for one) in an Unpaid state. Already-scheduled jobs stay on your routes — Mowzey doesn't strand a customer over a single failed charge.

You don't have to monitor email

Every retry attempt and every customer email is written to the email log on the customer's profile. Open the customer, click Activity, and you can see exactly when Mowzey emailed them and what the template said.

What you should do

In most cases, the customer fixes it themselves from the email link and the next retry succeeds. When that doesn't happen — usually after 3 to 5 days of no movement — it's worth a quick touch:

  • Call or text the customer. A friendly "hey, looks like the card on file for your service expired" almost always gets it sorted within 24 hours.
  • Send a fresh card capture link. From Settings → Customers, pick the customer, click Send card capture link. It's the fastest path if their old card is fully dead.
  • Accept cash or check this once. Mark the invoice paid manually (see Charging clients manually) and ask them to update the card before the next visit.

Common reasons cards decline

  • Expired card. Easy fix — customer updates the expiry and CVV on the Stripe link.
  • Insufficient funds. Often clears on the next retry once payday hits. No action needed.
  • Fraud block. The customer's bank flagged the charge as suspicious. They need to call the number on the back of their card to clear it.
  • Card replaced or lost. Customer needs to enter the new card on the Stripe link.

The specific decline reason shows up on the invoice page in Mowzey, underneath the failed payment timeline. If you need more detail than that, open the same transaction in your Stripe dashboard.

Using the Stripe dashboard for full history

Mowzey shows you the headline status — paid, past due, refunded. For the full transaction trail (every retry, every webhook, every receipt) the source of truth is your Stripe dashboard.

A useful pattern: when a customer disputes a failed charge or asks why their card was hit, log into Stripe, search by customer email, and you'll see the full timeline including Stripe's own retry notes. You can also forward Stripe's receipts directly to the customer from there.

Pro tip

Set up Stripe to email you on failed payments too (Stripe dashboard → Settings → Email preferences → Failed payments). That way you hear about a failure within minutes, not at end-of-week when you're reviewing the overdue list.

When to write an invoice off

If retries are exhausted, the customer's gone silent, and you've decided to stop chasing it, open the invoice and click Write off. The invoice moves to Uncollectible, the customer's balance is cleared, and Mowzey's $3 platform fee on that invoice is forfeited — same as the off-platform payment case. The customer's card on file isn't deleted, so if they come back later you can pick up where you left off.