This page is for a B2B SaaS business already collecting through Stripe, GoCardless, Chargebee or direct debit, where most invoices settle themselves and the problem is the ones that don’t. If you’re still raising and chasing invoices manually, the main guide to credit control software is a better starting point.
Summary
- Why automated payments still leave you chasing: GoCardless puts the average direct debit failure rate at 2.9%. Those failures split into five problems, including customers on invoice terms who never had a payment method to fail.
- How your payment provider retries: Stripe retries for up to two months, GoCardless doesn’t retry as standard, Chargebee adds its own logic.
- What to do once the retry window closes: a four-stage chase sequence, from a personal email to restricting account access, with a worked example from a 10-person B2B software company.
- How the credit controls tools compare: Trove, Chaser and Upflow on retries, escalation, invoice-terms customers and pricing, from £50/month flat to £199/month tiered.
Why automated payments still leave you chasing invoices
The 80/20 rule states that you will spend 80% of your time on 20% of the work. On payment collection, the ratio is even more extreme: GoCardless puts the average direct debit failure rate at 2.9%.
But that 2.9% quickly adds up. On £2m of ARR collected by mandate, that’s roughly £58,000 a year that needs manual intervention beyond your automated payment system.
Payments can fail for a whole variety of reasons but here are the top five to watch out for that often need manual intervention.
Insufficient funds. GoCardless attributes more than 80% of its customers’ failures to this. Retrying at the right moment will often fix it and is something the payment provider will do automatically. However, if the client consistently has insufficient funds, they may have moved to a different bank account or be in financial difficulty. In this case, it’s time to get in touch with them.
Declined and expired cards. Retrying is a good first step for a declined card but an expired one needs a customer to update it. If they don’t do this themselves, you will need to email them.
Cancelled mandates. GoCardless reports that “instruction cancelled” accounts for around 15% of failed direct debit payments. In this case, you need a new authorisation which will require a conversation.
Customers on invoice terms. Your enterprise accounts almost certainly aren’t on a card. They’re on 30 or 60-day terms, paying by bank transfer against a PO. Stripe does have bank account functionality which helps with reconciliation when customers do pay but doesn’t do anything to to chase the payment down.
Disputed usage and overage charges. A customer who thinks the number is wrong won’t pay it and won’t tell you unless prompted. This one sits entirely outside your payment provider.
The first three are payment problems your provider partly handles. The last two are collections problems it doesn’t handle at all. Most B2B SaaS companies spend more time chasing payments further down the list.
What your payment provider’s built-in dunning covers
Every major provider has retry logic that is worth turning on. It’s generally included in the cost of your plan and will reduce the number of issues.
Stripe
Stripe’s Smart Retries use machine learning to pick retry timing rather than running a fixed schedule. You set a window of anywhere from one week to two months, with a recommended default of eight attempts across two weeks.
Stripe will email customers on failure if you turn it on, and you choose what happens when the window closes: cancel the subscription, mark it unpaid, or leave it past due.
A watch out - by default, Stripe doesn’t automatically retry failed non-card payment methods, including most direct debits. If part of your book pays by mandate, Stripe skips straight to the end action.
GoCardless
GoCardless doesn’t retry automatically at all as standard. A failed payment sits there until you either hit retry manually or subscribe to Success+, the intelligent retry product, which GoCardless says recovers up to 70% of initially failed payments.
Either way, a payment can only be resubmitted three times. After that you have to raise a new one.
Billing platforms (e.g. Chargebee)
Chargebee and similar all-in-one platforms layers its own retry and dunning logic on top of whichever processor you use. The configuration is richer and the emails are better but it does not provide additional collections functionality like payment plans, late fees or email bounce monitoring.
Stripe, GoCardless and Chargebee all have a limit
Once retries are exhausted, every one of these tools does the same thing: it changes a status in a database (usually to ‘failed’) and stops working to collect the payment.
There’s no escalation path after the retry window which is the point at which you need a separate collections tool.
What collections tools do when standard dunning fails
Here are a few ways credit control tools get to work once a payment provider’s dunning process has failed.
Stage one: a real email from a real person. The moment retries are exhausted, send from a named inbox rather than billing@. Reference the specific invoice and the specific reason. “Your card ending 4471 expired on 3 March” gets a response. “Payment failed” gets ignored, because it looks like the four automated emails that came before it.
Stage two: escalate the contact, not the tone. If the finance contact hasn’t replied in a week, go to the commercial owner of the relationship. In B2B SaaS the person whose card is on file is often not the person who cares whether the account keeps working.
Stage three: apply a late fee or other policy nudge. Collections tools will automatically apply statutory late fees which move your invoices to the top of the customer’s accounts payable list.
Stage four: restrict access. For a SaaS business this is the lever that a professional services firm doesn’t have and it works. It also needs handling carefully and collections tools will allow you to set up a sequence of warnings that ends in account restriction.
Here’s a typical scenario where a collections tool will be useful. You are the only finance person at a 10-person B2B software company which sells three different products with different terms. In this case you will need:
- Three different workflows which automatically enrol the correct invoices based on the product line items
- All emails set up to come from you - the head of finance - rather than a billing@ email
- A sequence of emails that ends in a set of warning emails to let the customer know the account will be frozen in a few days if there is no payment
- A final email giving confirmation that the account is frozen with instructions to restore access on payment.
Throughout, you want to be overseeing the process rather than doing the work directly.
Collections tools comparison (2026)
Most collections tools offer the core features you need to follow up on overdue invoices. It’s the pricing that makes a big difference for a B2B SaaS company.
Tools priced on a share of what they collect, or banded by revenue, get more expensive as you grow, which can often be unpredictable for a SaaS company. We’ve written about how credit control tools charge and why the model matters.
| Retry handling | Escalation past retries | Late fees and payment plans | Customer payment portal | No further emails once paid | Price basis | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe alone | Smart Retries, ML-timed, 1 week to 2 months | End action only (cancel, unpaid, past due) | No | Yes | Automatic within Stripe | % of transaction |
| GoCardless alone | Manual, or Success+ for automatic | None | No | No | Automatic within GoCardless | % of transaction, Success+ extra |
| Trove | Not a processor | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Flat £50/month, Essential plan |
| Upflow | Not a processor | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Tiered on revenue volume, no published pricing |
| Chaser | Not a processor | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Tiered on revenue volume, from £199/month |
Common questions
Does Stripe chase failed payments automatically? Stripe retries failed card payments through Smart Retries and can email customers on failure, across a window you set between one week and two months. It doesn’t chase beyond that window, and by default it doesn’t retry most direct debit payments at all.
Does GoCardless retry failed payments automatically? Not as standard. A failed payment waits for you to retry it manually, up to three times. Automatic retries require Success+, which GoCardless says recovers up to 70% of initially failed payments.
What is dunning in a B2B SaaS business? Dunning is the sequence of automated retries and notifications that follows a failed payment. In B2C subscription businesses it’s usually the whole collections process. In B2B it’s only the first part, because a meaningful share of revenue comes from customers on invoice terms who never had a payment method to retry.
How do you recover a failed subscription payment without losing the customer? Separate the payment problem from the relationship. Retries and automated notices handle the mechanical failures. Anything still outstanding after the retry window needs a personal email from a named sender, then escalation to the commercial contact, then a clear warning before you restrict access.
Can you automate credit control for customers on invoice terms? Yes, and it’s usually where the biggest gain is. These invoices sit outside your payment stack entirely, so they need a chase sequence driven by your accounting system rather than your processor.
Will automated chasing damage customer relationships? It depends entirely on what the emails look like. A chaser sent from a named inbox, referencing the specific invoice and reason, reads as a person following up. A fifth templated notice from billing@ reads as a system, and customers respond to it the same way they responded to the first four.
Trove picks up where Stripe and GoCardless stop: chase sequences that run from your own inbox, escalation past the retry window, and invoice-terms customers handled alongside subscription ones. It’s £50 a month on the Essential plan, flat, whatever your revenue does.
You can start a free 30-day trial here or book a demo if you’d rather see it first. Connecting takes about five minutes.
