What is payment recovery rate?

Payment recovery rate is the share of failed subscription payments that are eventually collected — the measure of how well a dunning process works. Where save rate scores the cancel moment, recovery rate scores the billing failure that nobody chose.

#Why it is worth tracking separately

A failed renewal is not a customer decision; it is usually an expired, replaced, or temporarily declined card. Money lost this way is recoverable in a way that a deliberate cancellation is not, so it deserves its own number rather than being folded into churn.

#How WallaB.AI computes recovery rate

Recovery rate is dunning cases in the recovered state divided by recovered plus exhausted cases. Cases still working through their retry ladder are not counted on either side, because their outcome is not known yet.

One case type is deliberately excluded from both sides: a ladder that was closed because the shopper reactivated the subscription themselves — by restarting it or redeeming a win-back — is superseded. Nothing was collected on the failed period, so counting it as a recovery would inflate the rate; the ladder also never ran out of rungs, so counting it as exhausted would deflate it. It is simply not a dunning outcome.

#Raising it

The lever is the retry schedule and the prevention that comes before it: a retry ladder tuned to the store's cadence, proactive card-expiry warnings, and — if the merchant opts in — a fallback to a card the customer already has on file. See What is dunning?, What is a backup payment method?, and Dunning & card-expiry warnings.