Failed payments

A payment has failed. What should I do?

In some cases, even when everything has been set up correctly payments can fail. In almost all cases, GoCardless will receive a payment failure report from your payers' bank one working day after the charge date. Once all payments have been processed, the payment status will be updated to reflect that the payment has failed.

You will be able to view the reason for a payment failure in the status timeline of the payment within the GoCardless dashboard. (If you've built an integration with our API, you will instead receive a webhook with the details of the payment and reason for failure.)

The most common reasons for a payment failure are Insufficient funds, Instruction cancelled, No Instruction, and Account Closed.

You can find a full list of failure codes for each scheme here.

How do I retry a failed payment?

Failed payments are not retried automatically. You will be able to manually retry a failed payment up to three times. As your customer should be expecting these funds to leave their account, you can retry them manually as their Direct Debit mandate remains active when a payment fails.

To manually retry a payment:

1. Locate the failed payment in your dashboard and open its individual record

2. Click Retry

The payment will be resubmitted and can be tracked via the payment timeline.

How can I switch to intelligent retries?

Failed payments are a concern for every business and can be costly and inefficient.

Success+ intelligently manages your customers’ late payments. With a 70% success rate, it will automatically collect failed payments on the day best suited to your customers and the retry criteria can be configured to suit your business needs. Success+ does this by looking at our extensive historical payment data to predict the best day to re-attempt collection to maximise the likelihood of success.

You can find more information on how to set up Success+ intelligent retries here.

My customer has checked everything and the payment is still failing. What should I do?

The reason codes for payment failures are sent by your customer's bank directly. We don’t have oversight of this and therefore we would advise that you ask your customer to contact their bank directly to understand the failure code.

You can also provide the customer with the failure code in the status timeline of the payment within the GoCardless dashboard. In some cases, a "catch-all" code may be used by the bank, rather than specifying the actual reason. These can usually be considered as "insufficient funds".

If the payment is still failing it may be worth asking your customer to try another bank account. 

Alternatively, if you feel this hasn’t answered your questions, or you would like to raise a dispute as you’re unhappy with the service provided by GoCardless please email complaints@gocardless.com.