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Last updated on Aug 27, 2026
Customize the retry timing, messages, and final action for Subscribers whose Direct Debit payment fails, whether your site processes Direct Debit through GoCardless, Stripe, or Maxio Payments. Focus your dunning emails on updating banking information instead of card details.
Direct Debit lets you specify, for each dunning step, whether to retry the payment, send an email, or both. This means you can notify Customers of a payment failure by email without also retrying payment, to avoid additional gateway transaction fees.
To configure a Direct Debit dunning schedule

Due to Direct Debit processing time, the minimum interval between retry attempts is 5 days.
When editing or adding a step, you can:
The last step in a Direct Debit schedule is its Final Action. The Final Action can't retry payment and must be either Cancel Subscription or Mark as Unpaid; if you need to notify the Customer at this step, use email only.
Select the day Advanced Billing takes the Final Action, then choose:

Each step in the schedule can send an email notification. Select Edit on a step, then move the Send Email slider to on to launch the email editor. Within the email editor, you can customize the subject and body of the email. You can also create a custom layout to personalize the look and feel of the email.

To BCC yourself on a given step's email, check Email BCC List for that step.

Include dynamic text to give the Subscriber the specific information they need, such as why their account is in dunning. See Dunning Email Parameters Reference for the full list of available parameters.

To change the address your dunning emails are sent from, or add a BCC address for your own records, see Set Dunning Email From Address and BCC.
For the equivalent ACH setup, see Configure ACH Dunning.
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