Recovery metrics and reporting reference
Definitions and formulas for failed payment recovery metrics: recovery rate, baseline, incremental lift, time to recovery, attempts per recovery, outreach funnel.
Reference maintained by the FlyCode team. Last reviewed September 2026.
Core metrics
Failed payment rate
Share of subscription charges that fail on first attempt.
failed first attempts / total first attempts
Typically 5 to 15 percent for subscription businesses; higher for consumer, prepaid-heavy and low-AOV books.
Recovery rate
Share of failed invoices eventually paid within the recovery window.
recovered failed invoices / failed invoices
Report by count and by amount; large invoices skew the amount view. Processor defaults land at roughly 40 to 55 percent; best-in-class programs reach 70 to 91 percent.
Baseline recovery rate
Recovery rate before a new tool or process, over a fixed lookback (90 days is standard).
as above, over the pre-change period
The comparison point for every lift claim. Freeze it at cutover.
Incremental recovery (lift)
Recovery attributable to the change, above the baseline.
(recovery rate after minus baseline) x failed amount
Express as percentage points and as currency. FlyCode charges a percentage of this amount only.
Incremental lift on top of processor defaults
Incremental recovered revenue divided by what the processor failed to recover.
incremental recovered / (failed amount x (1 minus baseline))
The denominator is the recoverable pool, not all failures; this is how the open Stripe recovery benchmark scores vendors.
Time to recovery
Days from first failure to successful payment.
median and p90 of (paid date minus first failure date)
Shorter is better for cash flow and for customer experience; watch p90 for long tails.
Attempts per recovery
Retries used per recovered invoice.
total retry attempts / recovered invoices
Lower with better timing. Rising attempts with flat recovery signals a stacked or over-aggressive schedule.
Retry success rate
Share of retry attempts that are approved.
approved retries / retry attempts
Compare by decline code and by attempt number.
Recovery by method
Split of recoveries by how they were achieved.
retry / backup payment method / outreach / manual
Shows how much is silent. A healthy program recovers most soft declines before any message is sent.
Outreach funnel metrics
Contact rate
Failed invoices that received at least one email or SMS / failed invoices
Should be well below 100 percent; silent recovery handles the rest.
Open and click rate
Standard email and SMS engagement on recovery messages
Segment by decline type; hard-decline messages should outperform.
Update completion rate
Card updates completed / update links clicked
Login-free links raise this materially.
Outreach-attributed recovery
Invoices paid within a defined window after a message, with no successful retry in between
Attribution window and precedence rules must be stated.
Opt-out rate
Unsubscribes or STOP replies / messages sent
Rising opt-outs usually mean messages are going out too early.
Churn metrics
Involuntary churn rate
Subscribers lost to unrecovered payment failure in a period.
cancellations for non-payment / subscribers at period start
Involuntary share of churn
How much of total churn is payment-driven.
cancellations for non-payment / all cancellations
Recovered MRR
MRR retained because failed invoices were recovered.
sum of MRR of recovered subscriptions
Post-recovery retention
Whether recovered customers stay.
recovered customers still active after 90 days / recovered customers
Benchmarks by segment are in Involuntary churn benchmarks by segment.
Reporting rules that keep the numbers honest
State the denominator. Recovery rate on "invoices we emailed" is not the same as recovery rate on all failed invoices. Campaign-based figures overstate performance.
Fix the window. Recovery windows of 21, 30 and 60 days produce different rates; report the window with the number.
Separate cohorts at cutover. Invoices that failed before a tool change belong to the old cohort even if they recover after it.
Watch first-attempt authorization. If first-attempt approval drifts down while a retry tool runs, retries are being stacked; net recovery should subtract that loss across all volume.
Report by count and amount. A tool that recovers many small invoices and misses large ones looks good by count only.
Where the numbers live in FlyCode
The FlyCode dashboard reports recovery rate against your frozen baseline, incremental recovered revenue, recovery by method (retry, backup card, outreach), time to recovery, attempts per recovery, the outreach funnel, trial recovery as a separate view, and Reactivation volume and engagement. Periodic reports summarize the same metrics for finance.
FAQ
What is a good failed payment recovery rate?
Processor defaults recover roughly 40 to 55 percent of failed subscription invoices. Programs combining adaptive retries, backup payment methods and coordinated outreach reach 70 to 91 percent in published customer results. The right comparison is your own baseline, not an industry average.
Why measure lift instead of gross recovery?
Because the processor already recovers a large share for free. A tool claiming 80 percent gross recovery may add little beyond that. Incremental lift over your baseline is what the tool actually delivered, and it is what pay-on-recovery pricing is based on.
How long should the baseline period be?
Ninety days is standard: long enough to cover three billing cycles and seasonal pay-date effects, short enough to reflect the current book.
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