Involuntary churn is recurring revenue lost because a payment failed or an invoice went unpaid, such as an expired card or an overdue invoice, not because the customer chose to leave.
A worked example
An example with made-up round numbers. A business bills $100,000 of monthly recurring revenue by card. This month $4,000 of charges fail. Retries and an email with a link to update the card recover $2,500. The other $1,500 stays unpaid, and 30 days later those subscriptions are cancelled. Involuntary churn for the month is $1,500, or 1.5% of starting MRR, and nobody chose to leave. The recovery rate was 62.5%. That is the number your dunning process controls, so it is the one to improve.
How to measure it, and where it hides
Report involuntary churn separately from voluntary churn, and track it with failed payment rate and recovery rate. For scale, Recurly’s July 2026 benchmarks put involuntary churn at about a third of all SaaS churn on its network (1.06% of a 3.22% median churn rate), and Stripe (2026) says businesses using its recovery tools recover 55% of failed payments on average. Both come from each vendor’s own network, so treat them as context, not a target. The cheapest catch is a report of stored cards expiring in the next 60 days; the B2B catch is an aging report reviewed weekly. The full playbook is in involuntary churn and dunning.
In Salesforce
Sales Cloud on its own doesn’t invoice or take payments, so a failed charge is recorded wherever billing runs: a gateway, an external billing platform or a billing package inside the org. Churn reaches the CRM later, as a renewal Opportunity closed lost or a Contract that ends, where a declined card looks the same as a decision to leave. When billing runs outside Salesforce, the account owner sees the failure only as far as the sync carries it, and often hears about it from the customer first. Salesforce positions Revenue Cloud Billing, sold separately from Revenue Cloud Advanced, for invoicing, payments and collections.
How Kugamon handles it
In Kugamon a failed payment is a Salesforce Payment record. The processor’s response sets the status to Declined, Error or Expired, with the processor’s message in the Payment Memo field, so a report or a Flow can act on it the moment it lands. Each Invoice carries an Age (days) field that stays blank until it is past due. Recurring Charges show the next payment date and carry Cancel, Suspend, Update and Bill for any Outstanding Amount controls. Cancelling a Contract sets its active Subscriptions to Cancelled and closes the Renewal Opportunity as Lost; the cancelled Subscription records stay on the Contract, so lost revenue stays reportable. There is no separate dunning module; the follow-up is built in Flow on these fields.
Related terms
- Dunning
- Net revenue retention (NRR)
- Gross revenue retention (GRR)
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- Days sales outstanding (DSO)
- Revenue leakage
Source: recurly.com