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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. Resolve Non-Paying Status Button
Important: You need to restart a customer’s recurring product schedule. For the duration that the customer was marked as Non Paying, no products were shipped out. Firmhouse will not have continued to calculate the next shipment dates for this customer. Upon resolving the customer’s Non Paying status, you will need to schedule any recurring shipments of the customer’s subscribed products.
For more information about payment dunning options, see Overview of Payment Dunning Options.