Dunning is the process of recovering a failed or overdue payment: retrying soft card declines, notifying the customer, escalating to a person and, if nothing works, suspending service.
A worked example
An example policy with round numbers, not a benchmark. A $2,000 monthly card charge fails on day 0 with a soft decline. The billing system retries on day 3 and emails the billing contact a link to update the card; it retries again on day 7 with a second email, and service stays on. On day 14 the account owner gets a task with the invoice, the balance and the payment history. Day 21 brings a final notice with the suspension date; on day 30 the recurring charge is suspended and the subscription flagged for review. If the customer updates the card on day 5, the day 7 retry clears and nothing is lost.
B2B dunning is collections
Card dunning is retries and emails. Invoice dunning is accounts receivable: reminders before and after the due date, an aging report, the account balance, a credit hold on new orders and the account owner making the call. It matters: in Atradius’s 2025 survey, 43% of US companies’ B2B credit sales were overdue. Write the policy down before the first case: retry days, grace period, suspension day and who approves exceptions. Measure recovery rate against your own baseline; Stripe (2026) says businesses using its recovery tools recover 55% of failed payments on average. The full workflow is in involuntary churn and dunning, and the payments guide covers gateways and ACH.
In Salesforce
Sales Cloud on its own has no dunning workflow, because it doesn’t invoice or take payments. What Salesforce does provide is Flow: once payment status, invoice due dates and balances are fields on records in the org, a reminder email, a task for the account owner or a credit-hold rule is ordinary admin automation. Salesforce positions Revenue Cloud Billing, a separate product from Revenue Cloud Advanced, for invoicing, payments and collections, including credit management. External billing platforms run dunning on their own side and sync the result into Salesforce, so the account owner sees what the sync carries.
How Kugamon handles it
Kugamon has no separate dunning module. Dunning is built in Salesforce Flow on native fields: the Payment status (Declined, Error or Expired, with the processor’s message in the Payment Memo field), the Invoice’s Age (days), which fills only once the invoice is past due, and the Recurring Charge controls to Cancel, Suspend, Update or Bill for any Outstanding Amount. Dunning sequences, credit holds and approval routing are Flows on those fields, and no Apex is required. Completed payments apply to the invoice and roll up to the account balance, so a Flow can read what is still owed before it sends the next reminder.
Related terms
- Involuntary churn
- Days sales outstanding (DSO)
- Revenue leakage
- Gross revenue retention (GRR)
- Quote-to-cash
Source: stripe.com