Churn & Recovery Glossary: 60 Terms Defined
Subscription teams use the same words to mean different things, and billing terms are the worst offenders. One person's churn rate is another person's cancellation count, and a retry can mean anything from an automatic second charge to a full recovery sequence. This glossary fixes the definitions in one place: 60 churn, dunning, and failed-payment recovery terms, in alphabetical order, in plain language.
Use it as a reference, not a lesson. For the math behind the headline metric, start with how to calculate churn rate. For the problem behind most of these terms, read the involuntary churn guide.
How to use this glossary
Terms run alphabetically, not by topic, so you can find one fast. Where a term has a formula, the formula is in the definition. Where a term describes something Swipe Again does, the general meaning comes first — product details, such as a 90-day backfill on connect, are noted only where they apply.
The glossary: A to Z
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| 3-D Secure (3DS) | An added bank authentication step where the cardholder confirms a payment, often in an app or with a one-time code. |
| Account Updater | A card-network service that automatically supplies a new card number or expiry date when a bank reissues a card. |
| Active Subscriber | A customer whose subscription is paid up, in trial, or in a grace period, and has not yet ended. |
| Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) | The yearly value of active subscriptions, usually monthly recurring revenue multiplied by 12, excluding one-time charges. |
| At-Risk Account | A subscriber showing a warning sign — a failed payment, a downgrade, or a started cancellation. A prompt to act, not a result. |
| Backfill | Working the backlog of failed payments from before a recovery tool connected. In Swipe Again, backfill covers 90 days on connect. |
| Billing Attempt | One single try to charge a payment method. Each attempt has its own result and, on failure, its own decline code. |
| Billing Portal | A self-service page where a subscriber views invoices, changes plans, and updates their payment method. |
| Cancel Deflection | Presenting an alternative when a subscriber tries to cancel — a discount, a pause, or help — instead of leaving. |
| Cancellation Flow | The steps from clicking cancel to the subscription ending, where save offers, exit questions, and confirmations appear. |
| Card Network | The system moving payment information between banks for a card brand, such as Visa or Mastercard. |
| Card-Update Page | A secure, branded page where a customer enters a new or corrected card after a payment fails. |
| Card Updater | Another name for Account Updater, or any tool refreshing stored card details from the network, bank, or customer. |
| Chargeback | A payment reversed through the customer's bank after a dispute, rather than refunded by the business. |
| Churn Rate | Customers lost during a period divided by customers at the start of that period, multiplied by 100. Always state the period. |
| Cohort | Subscribers grouped by a shared starting point, usually their first subscription month, tracked over time. |
| Decline Code | The coded reason a bank or processor returns when a charge fails. It decides whether, when, and how to retry. |
| Deflection Offer | The specific alternative shown in a cancellation flow. In Swipe Again: Discount, Pause, and Service, in the same flat price. |
| Delinquency | The state of an account whose payment is overdue, until payment is recovered or the subscription ends. |
| Do Not Honor | A generic bank decline with no specific reason given. Usually soft, but repeated results call for customer contact, not endless retries. |
| Downgrade | A surviving subscriber moving to a cheaper plan or fewer seats. It counts in revenue churn, not logo churn. |
| Dunning | Recovering a failed recurring payment: retries, customer messages, card updates, and a clean ending if payment never arrives. |
| Dunning Sequence | The ordered dunning plan: which retry happens when, which message follows each failure, and when the sequence stops. |
| Expired Card | A stored card whose expiry date has passed, so charges fail. The customer usually only needs to supply the new card. |
| Failed Payment | A recurring charge that did not go through. An event, not an ending: many are recovered before the subscription is lost. |
| Failed Payment Recovery | Turning failed payments back into paid subscriptions with retries, outreach, and card updates. It addresses involuntary churn specifically. |
| Grace Period | Days after a failed payment during which the subscriber keeps access while recovery is attempted. |
| Hard Decline | A refusal retrying cannot fix — a closed account or a stolen or lost card. Never retried; only a new card helps. |
| Insufficient Funds | A soft decline: the account lacked enough money at that moment. A later retry can succeed with no customer action. |
| Involuntary Churn | Subscriptions lost because a payment failed and was never recovered. Recurly research estimates 20–40% of subscriber churn is involuntary. |
| Issuer | The bank that issued the customer's card and decides whether to approve or decline a charge. |
| Issuer Unavailable | A temporary decline: the issuing bank could not be reached or respond. A later retry is appropriate. |
| Lifetime Value (LTV) | Total revenue expected from one customer over the whole relationship. Saving one subscriber can be worth far more than one payment. |
| Logo Churn | Another name for customer churn: lost accounts counted equally, regardless of what each paid. |
| Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) | Predictable subscription revenue collected in a month. One-time fees are normally excluded so months stay comparable. |
| Negative Churn | When expansion revenue from surviving customers exceeds revenue lost to churn and downgrades, so net revenue churn is below zero. |
| Network Token | A card-network reference standing in for the card number. Tokens can stay usable when a physical card is replaced. |
| Outstanding Balance | What a subscriber still owes for an unpaid period — what a successful retry or card update must collect. |
| Past Due | A subscription or invoice's status after a payment fails, before recovery or ending. Dunning is the work done about it. |
| Payment Gateway | The service transmitting a charge request securely between a business, its processor, and the card networks. |
| Payment Method Update | Any change replacing or correcting the card on file, by the customer, a portal, or an account updater. |
| Payment Processor | The company moving money for a charge with banks and networks. Stripe, Chargebee, Recurly, Braintree, and Paddle are platforms Swipe Again connects to. |
| Payment Retry | Charging the same payment method again after a failure, when the failure reason can change with time. |
| Pre-Dunning | Contacting a customer before a payment fails — usually a card-expiry notice with an update link. Prevention instead of recovery. |
| Processing Error | A temporary failure in handling the charge itself, not a bank decision about the card. A spaced later retry is usual. |
| Reactivation | Bringing back a subscription that already ended as a paying subscription again. Recovery works before the loss; reactivation after it. |
| Recovery Rate | Recovered failed payments divided by all failed payments in the same period, multiplied by 100. |
| Recurring Billing | Charging a stored payment method automatically on a repeating schedule — also the source of involuntary churn when a card stops working. |
| Retention Rate | The share of subscribers or revenue kept over a period. A 4% churn rate implies about 96% retention on the same base. |
| Revenue Churn | Recurring revenue lost from churned and downgraded accounts in a period, divided by recurring revenue at the start. |
| Retry Logic | The rules deciding whether a failed payment is retried, when, and how many times, based on decline type. |
| Retry Schedule | The timing pattern retry logic produces: the days later attempts happen, spread across the recovery window. |
| Save Offer | An alternative for a cancelling or past-due subscriber to stay on changed terms — a discount, a pause, or personal help. |
| Save Rate | The share of subscribers who entered a cancellation or save flow and stayed, counted against everyone who saw the flow. |
| Smart Retry | A retry timed using the decline reason, not a fixed pattern. In Swipe Again: up to 6 attempts over about 16 days; hard declines never retried. |
| Soft Decline | A temporary refusal that can succeed later — insufficient funds, a processing error, or an unavailable issuer. |
| Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) | A regulatory requirement, mainly in Europe and the UK, for two forms of verification on certain payments. A plain retry cannot complete those charges. |
| Subscription Pause | Temporarily stopping billing and usually service instead of cancelling — right when the subscriber's problem is timing, not value. |
| Voluntary Churn | Subscriptions a customer deliberately ends. The fix is product, pricing, onboarding, and save offers — not retries. |
| Winback | A campaign inviting former subscribers to return. Winback targets people already lost; deflection works before they leave. |
Five terms people mix up most
- Hard decline vs soft decline. Soft means time can fix it; hard means only a new card can. Retrying a hard decline wastes attempts.
- Past due vs delinquent vs churned. Past due is a status, delinquency is the state of being overdue, and churned is the ending, after recovery fails or the grace period runs out.
- Recovery vs reactivation vs winback. Recovery happens while the subscription is still alive. Reactivation and winback happen after it has ended.
- Logo churn vs revenue churn. Same losses, different counting: accounts versus dollars. Report both, or a quiet loss of large accounts hides inside a stable account count.
- Dunning vs retries. Retries are one tool inside dunning, which also includes emails, texts, card-update pages, and the decision about when to stop.
The bottom line
Most churn arguments are definition arguments in disguise. Agree on these terms once — especially churn rate, recovery rate, and what counts as a save — and the numbers that follow get easier to trust and faster to act on. For the published figures behind the involuntary side of this vocabulary, see our failed payment recovery benchmarks.
Swipe Again is failed-payment recovery software built for subscription businesses: decline-code-aware smart retries, branded dunning emails and card-update pages, SMS in the sequence, and cancel deflection, for $179/mo flat with a 14-day trial. The standing promise is: Recover $179 in 30 days, guaranteed — or Swipe Again is free the next 30 days.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between voluntary and involuntary churn?
Voluntary churn is a deliberate cancellation by the customer. Involuntary churn is a subscription lost because a payment failed and was never recovered, even though the customer did not choose to leave.
What does dunning mean in subscriptions?
Dunning is the full process of recovering a failed recurring payment: retrying the charge, messaging the customer, providing a card-update path, and ending the subscription cleanly if payment never arrives.
Why are hard declines never retried?
A hard decline means the card cannot be charged again — a closed account or a stolen card, for example. Retrying cannot change the result; only a new payment method from the customer can.
What is a backfill in payment recovery?
A backfill is working the backlog of failed payments that existed before a recovery tool connected, not only later failures. In Swipe Again, backfill covers 90 days on connect.
How is recovery rate calculated?
Recovery rate is failed payments recovered in a period divided by all failed payments in that period, multiplied by 100. Recovered normally means the amount was collected, by a retry or a card update.
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