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Collections, Retries, and Payment Issues

An article addressing financial operations and challenges—very useful for practice managers who handle payment collection issues frequently.

Updated yesterday

💳 How Are Plans Billed

When a pet is enrolled in a wellness plan:

  • The pet parent is automatically billed based on the plan’s billing cycle (e.g., monthly/yearly)

  • Charges are processed via Digitail Secure Payments

🔁 Automatic Retries for Failed Payments

If a payment fails, Digitail automatically retries the charge.

Digitail automatically attempts to process the payment three times. Let's consider the following example:

  • Payment due date: 2025-11-1 2:00pm (based on when the plan was activated)

  • 👉 First payment attempt: ~2025-11-1 2:00pm (Fail)

  • 👉 Second payment attempt: ~2025-11-1 11:59 pm (Fail)

  • 👉 Third payment attempt: ~2025-11-2 11:59 am (Fail)

The plan status changes from Active to Past Due (payment failed), and an Unpaid Sale/Invoice is created (which also means the client will have a new outstanding balance).

This helps resolve most issues without manual intervention.

While Digitail captures payments automatically and retries payments in case of failure, the clinic needs to review and track all plans.

📩 Bounced Payment Notifications

If a payment fails and retries are unsuccessful:

  • The pet parent receives a bounced payment email

  • This email includes a “Pay Now” button so they can settle the payment easily from their inbox


Plan Statuses Explained

Status

Payment Impact

Benefit Access

Active

Billing on schedule

✅ Yes

Past Due

Recent payment failed, retries ongoing

✅ Yes

Partially Paid

Some past recurrences are unpaid

✅ Yes

Canceled

Billing permanently stopped

❌ No


Reactivate a plan

Use case: the plan renewal has failed, and it switches to a past due status. Either the clinic or the client reaches out to pay the overdue plan invoice and reactivate the plan.

The clinic needs to locate the invoice(s) that are unpaid. To do that, the staff can navigate either to the Healthcard or to Sales Report.

The advantage of the sales invoices view is that the clinic can use a combination for Payment status, Client and Sales Type filters to locate the invoices.

Once the invoice(s) is/are paid the plan automatically switches to active.

This also happens if the staff sends the payment link to the pet parent they pay it themselves.


🧠 Best Practices for Clinics

  • Monitor plan status in the patient's report.

  • Educate pet parents to update their card in the Pet Portal (feature coming soon)

  • Proactively check for clients in Past Due to avoid cancellations

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