When a card stops working, somebody has to make a phone call

Cards fail constantly and almost never on purpose. They expire, they get reissued after a fraud alert, the bank blocks a recurring charge it does not recognise. In a school of two hundred families you should expect a handful every month, and essentially all of them are still happy customers.

That matters because it decides what the software should do about it, which is not what most software does.

Retrying forever is not a strategy

The default behaviour in a lot of billing systems is to keep trying. Every few days, quietly, for weeks. It costs nothing to run and it means nobody has to be told.

It also means that a family whose card was reissued in March is still not paying in May, is still attending twice a week, and nobody has spoken to them. When you do find out, the conversation is about four months of arrears rather than one, and that conversation loses families that a phone call in March would have kept.

Stop, and tell somebody

After a small number of attempts — three is a reasonable place to stand — stop trying and tell the school. Not a red dot in a dashboard nobody opens: a message with the family's name and their phone number in it.

The name and the number are the entire point. This is the one event in the whole system whose correct response is a human being picking up a phone, and a notification that does not contain a number is a notification that requires research before it can be acted on.

The child keeps coming

This is the part that has to be said explicitly, because everyone assumes the opposite. Billing stopping is not the same as the child being withdrawn. They are enrolled, they are on Tuesday's list, and their instructor is expecting them.

A school that reads “billing stopped” as “gone” will stop expecting a child who is still turning up, which is a worse failure than the missed payment.

Pausing is not cancelling

Injuries, a term abroad, a summer off. If the only thing you can do is cancel, then the family has to re-enter a card to come back — and a meaningful share of the ones who have to, don't.

Pause the collection and keep the card. The family comes back in January by saying so, rather than by finding their wallet.

Who pays the processing fee

In the United States, adding a surcharge to recover card fees is prohibited on debit cards under federal rules and restricted on credit cards in several states. Whether it is workable for you depends on where you are and on your card network agreements, and it is worth an actual conversation with your accountant rather than a setting in a piece of software. This is not legal or tax advice.