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What happens when a customer is marked as Non Paying?
What happens when a customer is marked as Non Paying?
Michiel Sikkes avatar
Written by Michiel Sikkes
Updated over a week ago

This article explains several things related to the Non Paying customer status in Firmhouse.

The Non Paying status is used to indicate something is wrong with a customer's payments or their payment method. It also has an effect on order generation, reporting, and emails being sent out.

Read through the following article to learn about its specifics.

When is a customer marked as Non Paying?

A customer gets marked as Non Paying in case any of the following situations happen on an automatic recurring order or invoice payment:

  • The 3rd automatic retry attempt on a payment fails.

  • A payment was charged back. Meaning that a customer deliberately reverted or disputed a payment via their bank or card supplier.

  • A customer waited too long to approve an automatic debit in their bank or card app.

  • An automated system at the customer's bank or card provider rejected the payment.

  • A customer's payment method expired or was blocked.

⚠️ Customers will not be marked as non-paying when any of the above situations occur for a payment initiated via the Manual payment button in the Firmhouse portal.

Your Payment Service Provider probably has more details on the payment when a chargeback happened.

The reason why Firmhouse marks a customer as non-paying in these situations is that either you or the customer needs to take some kind of action to ensure future automatic charges will be paid.

What happens when a customer is marked as Non Paying?

  • Your configured internal project notification email addresses are notified that a customer became non-paying.

  • If enabled, the customer will receive the Failed payment email notification.

  • If enabled, the customer will receive the Outstanding invoices email notification. This email includes a list of all outstanding invoices the customer still needs to pay.

  • ⚠️ Scheduled or recurring order generation will be stopped. This is to ensure you're not automatically shipping out your products to a customer that may fail to pay.

  • Recurring billing and invoice creation will continue. It's possible that new recurring invoices will immediately fail if there's a problem with the customer's payment method.

  • The customer will be visible under the Non Paying filter on the Customers overview.

Resolving a customer's Non Paying status

Here we explain the two ways in how customers are resolved as being "non-paying":

Automatically when all outstanding invoices paid

Starting 21 February 2022, Firmhouse automatically resolves non-paying customers for you when they've paid all their outstanding invoices.

Firmhouse automatically resolves a customer's non-paying status when the following conditions are met:

  • When a customer has paid for all open or failed/charged back invoices.

  • A customer is allowed to still have pending invoices open.

  • No retries are scheduled for failed invoices.

It's important to note that the non-paying status will not be automatically resolved when:

  • There are still invoices open that need to be paid. Even if those invoices are just created and still within the payment terms. We're working on fixing this too.

  • When a customer updates their payment method.

Orders in Shopify

If you have connected your project to Shopify, there is an unpaid invoice related to an order, and the non-paying customer pays it, the order will be created and pushed to Shopify.

Manually by you

You can manually resolve a customer's non-paying status by opening the customer in our portal and then pressing the Resolve button from the message near the top of the customer detail page.

⚠️ You need to restart a customer's recurring product schedule

Be aware that for the duration that the customer was marked as Non Paying no products were shipped out. That means that Firmhouse will not have continued to calculate the next shipment dates for this customer. This means that upon resolving the customer's Non Paying status you will need to schedule any recurring shipments of a customer's subscribed products.

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