Revenue Recovery: What Has Recurly Recovered for Me Lately?
Recurly's revenue recovery functionality has always provided merchants with peace of mind in reducing credit card declines, expired cards and other issues related to collecting recurring invoices. Even so, merchants frequently ask, "What has Recurly recovered for me lately?" Now, merchants can have that information right at their fingertips.
Today, the Invoices Summary export contains a new column: “Recovery Reason.” Using this field, merchants can determine which payments faced the risk of declines but were instead successfully processed via Recurly’s recovered revenue logic. Recovered revenue means the first transaction associated with an invoice initially failed. But, Recurly’s logic retried that transaction, and the invoice later became paid. That information is then recorded in the "Recovery Reason" field in the invoices summary export. Here are the possible ways Recurly can recover revenue:
Account updater: The Account Updater service updated the account's billing information.
Expiration date update: Recurly automatically moved the credit card expiration date to the future, allowing the card to be successfully processed.
Prior recovery: A prior invoice on this account succeeded due to one of the above reasons.
Retry: A transaction on this invoice initially failed, then succeeded when retried by Recurly.
Customer update: The account’s billing information was updated. This billing information change could have been done by the customer, prompted by a Recurly email, or it could have been done by the merchant.
Blank: If the field is blank, there was no attempt to recover revenue -- most likely meaning the invoice succeeded on the first try.
Invoices may be recovered for multiple reasons listed above, but only one reason will appear in the export. The recovery reasons are applied in a priority order: beginning with first expiration date update, then customer update, retry, account updater, and finally prior recovery. So, if a transaction initially failed and then Recurly updated the expiration date, this will appear as the reason even if there was a prior recovery on that account.
To find out your recovered revenue from Recurly, run the Invoices Summary export. Filter for the three automatic recovery reasons: account_updater, exp_date, and retry. If you want to include revenue recovered by customer contact, add customer_updates. Total the result and voilá, recovered revenue!
The average for a typical Recurly customer for the three fields reflecting automatic processing is roughly 7%. Including customer updates adds another 2%. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
For more information, please see Invoice Summary documentation.
