Subscription collection (abonnementsinkasso)
Also known as subscription arrears, membership collection, recurring billing arrears
Subscription collection is recovering arrears on recurring subscriptions — where the claim grows every month and the customer usually has to be kept.
- Characteristic
- The claim recurs
- Amounts
- Typically small, many
- Special concern
- The customer is usually worth keeping
In practice
Two things set subscription arrears apart from an ordinary invoice. The claim does not stop — next month’s charge arrives whether or not the last one was paid. And the customer is usually one you would like to keep, which puts a limit on how hard the process can be run.
That makes timing more important than tone. A failed payment caught within days can often be fixed with a fresh collection attempt; arrears allowed to run for three months have become a sum the customer has to decide to pay.
Which is why the question of when to suspend the service is the central one in these cases. Suspend too early and you lose a customer who would have paid. Suspend too late and the claim grows beyond what the customer can handle.
Where it commonly goes wrong
- Failed payments are treated as arrears. Most are an expired card, not an unwillingness to pay.
- Arrears are allowed to accumulate. Three months of subscription is three times harder to collect than one.