Seven ways to reduce your failed direct debits
Reversals come with the territory, but the number you end up with is largely your own choice. When you collect, how you announce it and what happens when it goes wrong together decide whether you land at two percent or eight.
Below are seven things that deliver most in practice, from moving your collection date to cleaning up mandates that stopped being correct long ago.
In short
- Collect shortly after the day most people are paid, rather than at the end of the month.
- Announce the payment in advance; people who know it is coming reverse it less often.
- Retry automatically, but do not do it the very next day.
- On a reversal, send a payment link straight away rather than a demand.
Pick a better collection moment
Most reversals caused by insufficient funds happen because collection lands exactly when accounts are at their emptiest. Collecting in the last days of the month is therefore almost always the worst choice.
Move your collection run to shortly after the day most of your members are paid. For many Dutch employers that falls around the 24th or at the start of the month. Test it for a few months and watch what happens to your rate; this is usually the single biggest gain.
Announce the payment
A pre-notification is a short message a few days before collection: this amount, this date, this membership. It costs you nothing and removes two kinds of reversal: people startled by an unfamiliar payment, and people who could easily have topped up in time.
Keep it short and friendly, and make sure the amount and date match what will appear on the statement. A member who recognises the payment does not press the button at the bank.
Retry smartly, not quickly
Presenting a failed collection again the very next day rarely works, because if the account was empty yesterday it is empty today. Better to wait until after the next payday.
Let that happen automatically and decide in advance how many attempts you make before a person looks at it. That keeps the standard cases out of your inbox and shows you only the members where something is genuinely wrong.
Send a payment link, not a demand
The fastest way to get the money in after all is a message with a link that lets somebody pay by iDEAL in ten seconds. Every extra step, logging in, copying an account number, looking up an amount, costs you a share of the payments.
Save the formal tone for later in the process. The first reminder may sound as though you assume it simply went wrong, because in the vast majority of cases it did.
Send that message through the channel your member actually watches. A push notification or WhatsApp gets read more often and faster than an email among the newsletters.
Frequently asked questions
It varies a great deal by audience and by collection moment, so a single figure says little. What does work is tracking your own rate per month and watching what happens when you move the collection date or add a pre-notification.
Only if your terms and conditions provide for it and the amount is reasonable. Have those terms reviewed by somebody qualified before you introduce it, and weigh up that a penalty on a first incident often causes more cancellations than it saves in costs.
Yes. Failed collections are presented again automatically on the schedule you set, your members get a payment link by email, SMS or WhatsApp, and you see in one overview what stays outstanding and why.
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