Stripe payment failure: Do I still need to check my Money Dashboard on every payment date?

The main reason Coacha was created was so that we could provide coaches with one, singular space where they could manage the essential aspects of their club administration. All our subscribers use Coacha for a specific feature individual to their own needs. Many of these subscribers get on board specifically due to Coacha’s payment management system.

With a process in place to receive notifications when a payment fails, keeping track of your payments has never been easier. We received a support request recently where the user didn’t notice that some of their payments weren’t being taken over a period of a few months. They were initially frustrated as Coacha hadn’t notified them, however, the problem was that the club owner had missed the members off the list during the initial setup, meaning that their payment plans were never created in the first place. Obviously, Coacha couldn’t flag this because it was never set up.

We wanted to bring you an article, along with a three-step-process to highlight the importance of ensuring your payments are fully and accurately set up. This is so that you can avoid surprise payments for your members when you realise they haven’t been paying for a few months.

1. Once you’ve finished setting up your payments, we would advise that you go through your master list alongside your Money Dashboard and ensure that everybody is 100% setup and requested.
   
   
2. When you think that all your members’ payments are setup successfully, re-check your Money Dashboard to see a status change from ‘requested’ to ‘set up’.
   
   
3. On your selected payment date, for the first month or two, head back to the Money Dashboard. Take a few minutes to scroll and ensure that all payment statuses are ‘Paid’, just for your own peace of mind.

Once you’re confident that all payment plans are setup accurately and payments are being taken efficiently and regularly, you can stop checking the Money Dashboard so frequently.

Repeated failed attempts

This is something we touched on briefly before, but we thought it may be worth mentioning again.

A Stripe account is created with basic settings initially. If a payment is unsuccessful four times in a row, Stripe recognises that there is a problem with the card and cancels the subscription.

To avoid the hassle of re-setting-up the payment, you can change the settings in Stripe and choose between cancelling the subscription, marking it as unpaid and leaving it as-is. You can find out how to change these settings here.