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The Non Paying status is used to indicate something is wrong with a customer’s payments or their payment method. This status affects order generation, reporting, and email notifications. This article explains when customers are marked as non-paying, what happens when they are, and how to resolve the status.

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When is a Customer Marked as Non Paying?

A customer gets marked as Non Paying when any of the following situations occur on an automatic recurring order or invoice payment:
  • The 3rd automatic retry attempt on a payment fails
  • A payment was charged back, meaning the 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
Your Payment Service Provider likely has more details on the payment when a chargeback occurred.
Note: 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.
The reason Firmhouse marks a customer as non-paying in these situations is that either you or the customer needs to take action to ensure future automatic charges will be paid.

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What Happens When a Customer is Marked as Non Paying?

When a customer is marked as Non Paying, several things occur: 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 also receive the Outstanding invoices email notification, which includes a list of all outstanding invoices they still need to pay. Scheduled or recurring order generation will be stopped. This ensures you’re not automatically shipping out products to a customer that may fail to pay. However, recurring billing and invoice creation will continue. New recurring invoices may 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, making it easy to identify and manage customers with payment issues.

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Resolving a Customer’s Non Paying Status

There are two ways to resolve a customer’s non-paying status:

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Automatically When All Outstanding Invoices Are Paid

Firmhouse automatically resolves non-paying customers when they’ve paid all their outstanding invoices. The non-paying status is automatically resolved when the following conditions are met:
  • The 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
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), or when a customer updates their payment method without paying outstanding invoices.

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Orders in Shopify

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

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Manually by You

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

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Recover Skipped Products After Non Paying Status Is Resolved

For plan-based projects and order-based projects with plan support, you can decide what happens to plan-scheduled products that were skipped while a customer was Non Paying. Recovery runs in both of these situations:
  • Automatic resolution: Firmhouse resolves the status after all invoices requiring action have been paid or credited and no failed payment retries are still scheduled. Pending invoices that do not yet require action may remain.
  • Manual resolution: A merchant selects Resolve on the customer page.
The same project-level recovery behavior is used in both situations. Updating a payment method without resolving the outstanding invoices does not run recovery.

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Choose a Recovery Behavior

Go to Settings > Payment dunning, choose a behavior under Previously skipped products, and save your changes: Firmhouse recovers skipped products together at most once per subscription. A customer with multiple subscriptions can receive one recovery order for each qualifying subscription. After that recovery, the products’ regular schedules continue.

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Choose Which Missed Shipments to Recover

For either recently missed shipments behavior, use Recover shipments missed in the last to choose how old a skipped shipment date can be and still be included in the recovery order. The default is 90 days. Firmhouse measures this separately for each product from its original missed shipment date:
  • A product that should have shipped 60 days ago is included in the recovery order.
  • A product that should have shipped 120 days ago is not included. Firmhouse repeatedly adds its regular interval to the missed date until it reaches the next future shipment date.
For a project where every product uses one shipment frequency, Firmhouse evaluates the subscription’s single shared shipment date. All products remain together on the resulting shared date. When that shared shipment date is missing, Recover recently missed shipments in 3 days sets it to three days after the Non Paying status is resolved. There is no original date to compare with the configured number of days in that case. This setting only affects the two behaviors that mention recently missed shipments. Recover all skipped products immediately ignores it.

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Upcoming Order Notices for Recovery Orders

When Recover recently missed shipments in 3 days schedules a recovery order, Firmhouse queues one Upcoming order notice when the project’s email, ordering, and communication-channel settings support it. For one-frequency projects with Send Upcoming order notice when shipment date changes enabled, the existing shipment-date-change scheduler handles the notice. Otherwise, recovery queues it directly instead of relying on the product’s normal three- or seven-day interval timing. A product that advances to its regular schedule exactly three days from now can use the same notice path. The Payment dunning settings page shows the result for the project’s current email and ordering settings:
  • Upcoming order notice is enabled: the notice is enabled, the ordering strategy supports it, and the Email or Klaviyo delivery channel is available. Delivery is queued when recovery is scheduled.
  • No customer notice with the current email settings: the email is disabled. The recovery order still waits three days.
  • No customer notice with the current ordering strategy: the order-based project uses opt-in ordering, which does not support Upcoming order notices. The recovery order still waits three days.
  • No customer notice while Klaviyo is unavailable: Klaviyo is the selected customer communication channel, but its app is not healthy.
  • No customer notice while customer communications are disabled: the project does not currently have an active delivery channel.
Customer-specific delivery rules still apply when the notice is queued:
  • Upcoming order notice must be enabled under Settings > Emails.
  • Paused customers only receive it when Also send while subscription is paused is enabled.
  • Firmhouse sends at most one Upcoming order notice to a customer per day.
  • Order-based projects must use the opt-out ordering strategy that supports Upcoming order notices.
  • A subscription on its final pending-cancellation cycle does not receive the notice.
  • A stopped subscription can have its schedule recovered, but does not receive the notice.
For more information about payment dunning options, see Overview of Payment Dunning Options.