Dues, failed payments and dunning

A card expires. It happens to every membership eventually, and it happens silently — the client doesn't know, and the first anyone finds out is when a charge fails.

What follows is called dunning: the sequence of states and attempts between "the charge failed" and either "they paid" or "somebody has to do something".

Where the money is actually charged

Stripe holds the subscription and makes the charges on your connected account. RewireBox records every attempt against the membership, so the answers to did this person pay, why was it declined and when is the next try live on the member's panel rather than in a separate dashboard.

There is deliberately no second retry schedule running in RewireBox on top of Stripe's. Two systems retrying the same invoice is how a client gets charged twice for one month, and that is a far worse day than a late payment.

The states, in order

Active → a charge fails → Past due. Another attempt is planned. Most memberships that reach past due leave it again without anyone doing anything, because the client's bank was being cautious rather than their card being dead.

Past due → attempts run out → Unpaid. There is no further automatic attempt. The money is owed and a person has to act.

A payment landing on an unpaid membership brings it back to Active and clears the counters — recovering the member is the entire point, so nothing here is a one-way door.

Two states sit outside this loop entirely: Paused and Cancelled. A late event arriving from Stripe can't un-pause or resurrect a membership somebody deliberately stopped.

What to actually do

When a membership goes past due, do nothing for a bit. The retry is coming and chasing a client for a payment their bank is about to approve is a bad look.

When it goes unpaid, it's a conversation. The failure reason is recorded against the attempt — an expired card and a declined card need different sentences, and having the reason to hand is the difference between "your card didn't work" and "your card expired in July, shall I take a new one?"

Once you have the new card on the client's record, run a manual retry rather than waiting for the next cycle. Otherwise the member has a gap in what they paid for and you have an awkward month to reconcile.