Hey Reader,

A new day, a new week even - and we're talking about failed payments and how we handle them.

I've worked with some busy business owners over the past 8 years. Some of whom have had hundreds (thousands?!) of clients. When you have lots of different products at lots of different price points and lots of subscription type payments it can soon become confusing as to what is coming in when and who has what left to pay.

A client I worked with last year had 3 courses and a membership with consistent recurring revenue coming in from all of them. They were doing really well, and their bank account reflected that. She wanted me to create a revenue tracker so that everything was in one place, and because she had a real hatred of Google Sheets and Excel (due to some shitty accountants consistently mansplaining her business to her 🙄).

I brought everything, all her historical data and future opportunities into Airtable and quite quickly saw that there was thousands of £ owing to her over the previous 3 years. Obviously she didn't feel like she could go and chase that money up, but she did do some housekeeping around what it meant when someone's payment failed or stopped.

For those in her membership, she let them know that their subs had lapsed and did they want to restart or leave? 85% hadn't realised, so they started paying again, and the other 15% wanted to leave with love. With the course payments, with those who still had access or who were being taught, we chased the payments, and for those who had lapsed over a year ago she had to write up as a loss.

All of this to say - it is easy to notice when a payment fails when you are waiting for that payment. When you're used to money coming into your business on a regular basis, it is more likely that you will miss the missed payments because there are more to miss.

Using Airtable as a base for this data can help, and automating alerts from Airtable means that you are also not relying on checking Stripe, Xero or your emails to see if anything is wrong.

This is my absolute jam, so welcome to my weekly insight into my brain!

Have you ever spotted a failed payment way later than you’d like? Or do you have a system in place that catches them straight away? Hit reply and let me know, I’m nosy and love hearing how people manage this!

Speak soon,

Zx