💳 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
The email also include an "Update card" button so the pet parent can update an expired or a stolen payment method.
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.
Refund a plan payment
A wellness plan charge can be refunded only when the plan has been canceled. The refund can easily be done from the payments report.
The best way to isolate a specific charge is to set the value for the "from" date - "to" date filters, search for the client in the client dropdown and select "on a plan" value from the "Wellness plan" filter.
Using the pet portal to update the payment method associated with a plan
We explained here that both the pet parent and the clinic receive notifications for missed payments.
Sometimes payments are missed because a card has expired. Pet parents can use the pet portal to add a new card and replace the old card with the existing one.
The flow is the following (from the missed payment email)
Tap on the update card button.
Navigate to the plan details in the pet parent app (after logging in).
Tap on the "Update card" button.
Tap on "Add a new card"
Once the new card is added, tap on the other card. You will see the "current" label changing from one card to the other.
Optionally, delete the old card.
A pet parent cannot delete a card that is associated with a plan. They can only update it with a new one.
🧠 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