Recurring Payments and Dunning for Perfex CRM

Perfex CRM’s own documentation says it plainly: a recurring invoice is used only to re-create the invoice on a specific date. The document goes out on schedule, correctly numbered, with the right items on it – and then nothing happens. No card is charged. No mandate is debited. Somebody in your office still opens the list every month, works out who has not paid, and writes the emails.

This module is the other half. Your customer authorises a card or a bank debit once, from your own client portal. After that, when Perfex generates the recurring invoice, the money is collected automatically – and when a charge fails, a dunning engine works the decline until the money arrives or you decide to stop.

Dunning is the automated sequence of retries and emails that chases a payment which failed. It is the part no option inside Perfex covers today – see the table below – and it is where the money is.

Stripe, in its own engineering post on Smart Retries, writes: “Twenty-five percent of lapsed subscriptions are purely due to payment failures.” Recurly’s published churn benchmarks put the overall churn rate at 3.60%, of which 1.25 points are involuntary – revenue lost to a card that failed rather than to a customer who decided to leave – and Paddle puts involuntary churn at 20-40% of overall churn. That share is what a dunning engine exists to win back.

It is worth winning back, and the timing is most of the job. Recurly reports that 90% of recovered transactions occur within the first 10 days of a failed payment. Baremetrics, measuring over a million dunning emails sent by its Recover customers, puts recovery at 13.25% for the email sent the day the payment fails, against 4.22% for the one sent on day 15; across almost 300,000 pre-dunning emails, the notice sent 30 days before a card expires recovers 14.37% – the best result in the set, because it arrives before anything breaks. And Recurly, analysing one enterprise merchant’s failed transactions, found that merchant’s existing retry logic recovering roughly 53% of eligible failures, and optimised retry timing reaching roughly 71% on the same transactions.

Every figure above is another vendor’s, measured on that vendor’s own network and published on that vendor’s own site. This module ships the machinery those figures describe – a retry schedule you set, decline classification, an escalating email sequence and a card-expiry warning – inside Perfex. It does not promise you their recovery rates.

This is a module for Perfex CRM, not a standalone script

You need a licensed, working Perfex CRM 3.4.x installation, sold separately. This module installs into it under Setup > Modules and adds one sidebar section. It modifies no core file, and it uninstalls cleanly.

This is an independent third-party module. It is not published by, affiliated with or endorsed by the authors of Perfex CRM, and it is not affiliated with Stripe, GoCardless or Paystack.