# Optimizing failed payment retries

Source: https://docs.arcxp.com/en/products/subscriptions/managing-subscriptions-settings/optimizing-failed-payment-retries.html

Use the Payment retry optimization page in Subscription Settings to configure custom retry rules for failed payments. This configuration helps you manage declined payments, set payment retries, recover revenue, and reduce churn.

Arc XP handles the following payment decline types:

- **Soft declines** \- temporary issues that can be solved through retry attempts, such as insufficient funds, gateway errors, card limits, or issuer timeouts.
- **Hard declines** \- permanent issues requiring customer action, such as lost or stolen cards, closed accounts, invalid card numbers, or permanently blocked cards.

## Scenario: Recovering failed payments

Your news organization noticed an increase in subscription payment failures. As the digital subscriptions admin, you set Smart Dunning in Subscription Settings to minimize revenue loss.

You configure custom retry rules for both soft and hard declines.

For soft declines, like insufficient funds, you set up an automated three-attempt retry sequence over a seven-day period. For hard declines, like expired cards, you create email notifications that prompt users to update their payment details.

This configuration helps your team recover potentially lost revenue by automatically addressing payment issues before they lead to canceled subscriptions.

## Procedures

## Setting decline types

To set the payment decline type, complete the following:

1. Navigate to **Subscriptions** \> **Settings** \> **Sales** \> **Smart dunning** \> **Decline codes**. The Decline codes page opens, showing a table with the decline codes from your payment providers.
2. Filter your providers using the drop-down menu. The tables update accordingly, showing each provider’s decline codes.
3. Select either **Soft decline** or **Hard decline** for each decline code.

## Creating a payment retry optimization

Payment retry optimizations provide chances to retry payments when initial attempts failed using dunning logic.

You can structure retry attempts based on specific days of the month or a set number of days following the initial failure. We recommend limiting your configuration to fewer than _five_ attempts within a 45-day window to comply with credit card processing requirements.

To configure your payment retry rules, complete the following:

1. Navigate to **Subscriptions** \> **Settings** \> **Sales** \> **Smart dunning**. The Payment retry optimization page opens, showing the optimizations configured for each payment provider.
2. Click **Create optimization**. The Create optimization page opens.
3. Select a **Nickname** for your optimization from the drop-down menu.
4. In the Soft decline payment retry rules section, click **Add retry rule**. The Add payment retry rule pane opens.

  1. Select the cadence for the payment retry from the following options:

    - **Days until next payment retry** \- set a number of days after the due date to automatically retry.
    - **Day of month attempt rule** \- select a specific day for retry.
    - **Send to Vindicia -** configure when to send unpaid accounts to Vindicia. To learn more, see [How to set up Vindicia integration](https://dev.arcxp.com/subscriptions/how-to-guides/how-to-set-up-vindicia-integration/).
  2. Toggle on the **Contact customer** section to send email notifications to customers if a payment retry fails.
  3. Click **Save**.
5. In the **Soft decline termination settings**, choose to terminate subscriptions either after a specific number of days or after the last retry attempt.
6. In the **Hard decline grace period**, enter the number of **Grace period days** before termination.
7. Optionally, select additional contact attempts after the subscription ends.
8. Click **Save**.

To edit these configurations, click the ellipsis icon ![icon_ellipsis.png](https://docs.arcxp.com/images/learning-center/image/img-36e988534106c557aab2119deabbbed2.png) next to each optimization and set the retry processes as needed.