How does Coacha help with failed payments?

How does Coacha help with failed payments?

Here at Coacha, we’re all coaches. So, we get it. We know how much of a hassle collecting payments from athletes can be – whether it be manually or through an automated system. One way or another, it’s often that payments slip the net/you end up having lists of people to chase because payments have failed to be taken. And we know that it’s hard to keep track of these situations.

We’ve tried, as always, our hardest to make things as simple as possible for our users. If you don’t know already, you can set up as many subscription plans as you like within Coacha and assign your members to them. You can also take one-off payments for things such as competition fees/uniform.

We integrate with Stripe (a payment management system, similar to PayPal) and Gocardless (a direct debit service) to collect your payments. The integration is super cool & allows us to implement features to benefit our users to our maximum ability.

Stripe and Gocardless both handle reconciling payments.

Gocardless

Payment failures are much lower with Direct Debit than with credit or debit cards (which can expire or be lost or stolen). Should a payment fail, GC will retry to take the payment 3 times it at no extra charge.

Stripe

When an athlete’s payment fails, firstly, you will be notified through Coacha. It can fail for various reasons such as insufficient funds (most commonly). Then Stripe’s automatic settings are to retry to collect the payment 3 days after the first attempt, 5 days after the previous attempt and then a final 7 days after the last attempt. After this, the subscription is cancelled as Stripe realises there is something wrong with the card (although you can change this if you wish).

Unlike with many of our competitors, this process incurs no extra charge to you or the athlete.

When Stripe is retrying to collect the payment, the payment’s status in the Money Dashboard will state ‘retrying’ until it eventually changes to ‘paid’ or ‘failed’. You can also log into Stripe to find out the exact reason the payment failed. The 2 most common reasons we see are:

• Insufficient funds – This means there was wasn’t enough money in the member’s account
• ‘Do not honour’ – This is where the bank chooses to decline the payment. In this case, the member needs to contact their bank and inform them to allow the payment. Although this reason doesn’t occur nearly as often as ‘insufficient funds’

It’s worth noting that you can change these settings to suit your specific needs. You can do this by logging into Stripe and heading to the Subscriptions section in the left-hand navigation bar:

Then navigate to ‘Settings’ in the below menu:

You’ll see the ‘retry rules’ here – you can click the drop-down arrows to change the amount time between the retrying of the collection of the payment:

 

There are other settings you can alter here such as informing your members/parents when their payment fails or around the time their card is due to expire:

 

If, after a final attempt of retrying, the payment still fails, you will be notified and then it will be down to you to manually chase the payment.

This feature is one of the biggest reasons many of our clubs get on board, it takes a huge amount of pressure off the club owner, automating the process as much as it can, only leaving you to chase the failed payment as a last resort.

If you have any questions, or if there’s anything we can help with at all, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.