Dunning ROI Worksheet: Run Your Recovery Math

Recovery tools are easy to buy on a promise and hard to judge on a spreadsheet. This worksheet fixes that: eight inputs from your own billing data, five formulas, and one worked example, so you can state — in dollars, with your numbers — what dunning recovery is worth to your business and what any fee shape actually costs you. Work it once with last month's data before you evaluate any tool. For the reasoning behind each definition, read payment recovery ROI first; for the live version of the core math, use the recovery calculator alongside this page.

The discipline that matters most: recovered revenue means payments that would have been lost without the recovery work, not every payment that eventually cleared. Your billing platform's own retries already rescue a share of failures before any dedicated dunning starts. Count honestly, or every row below flatters you and the worksheet is decoration.

Step 1: Gather your inputs

Pull these from last month's billing data. Use a complete month, not your best month, and use the same month for every input.

Line	Input	Where to find it	Your number
A	Failed payment attempts last month (count)	Billing platform: failed charges in the month, deduplicated by subscriber where you can	[your A]
B	Average subscription price (ticket)	Your headline monthly price, or monthly recurring revenue divided by active subscribers	[your B]
C	Monthly failed volume in dollars	Calculated: A × B	[your C]
D	Payments currently recovered (count)	Failed charges from line A that eventually cleared under your current setup	[your D]
E	Current recovery rate	Calculated: D ÷ A	[your E]
F	Currently recovered revenue	Calculated: D × B	[your F]
G	Currently lost revenue	Calculated: C − F	[your G]
H	What you pay for recovery now (per month)	Tool fees, add-ons, or zero if you run on native retries alone	[your H]

If you cannot fill in line D, that is the worksheet's first finding: you are buying or neglecting recovery blind. Spend one month measuring before you spend anything on tools, and record the baseline in a stable format such as the recovery KPI template so the comparison survives staff changes and memory.

Step 2: Run the formulas

Formula	What it tells you
Failed volume: A × B = C	The gross dollars put at risk by failed payments each month, before any recovery.
Recovery rate: D ÷ A = E	The share of failed payments your current setup already saves. This is your baseline — any new tool is judged on what it adds above this line, never on the whole recovered total.
Lost revenue: C − (D × B) = G	What still walks away monthly after your current recovery. Multiply by 12 for the annual figure; for most operators this is the number that makes the decision.
Value of one recovery point: C ÷ 100	Each additional point of recovery rate is worth this many dollars a month. It converts vague promises about better recovery into a dollar test any quote has to pass.
Break-even recovery gain: (monthly fee ÷ C) × 100	The extra recovery points a tool must deliver, above your baseline, just to pay for itself. Below this gain it costs you money; above it, the surplus is yours to weigh against the effort of switching.

Step 3: The worked example — for illustration only

The figures below are invented to show the arithmetic. They are not benchmarks, averages, or a promise about your business. Replace every one with your own lines from Step 1.

Line	Example value (for illustration only)
A — Failed payments in the month	100
B — Average ticket	$50
C — Failed volume (A × B)	$5,000
D — Currently recovered	40
E — Current recovery rate (D ÷ A)	40%
F — Currently recovered revenue (D × B)	$2,000
G — Lost revenue (C − F)	$3,000 per month, or $36,000 annualised
Value of one recovery point (C ÷ 100)	$50 per month

Read the example the operator's way: with $5,000 of monthly failed volume, a tool would need to add a little over three and a half points of genuine recovery — above the 40% already recovered — to cover a $179 monthly fee, because $179 ÷ $5,000 is about 3.6%. Whether any given tool adds that much is a measurement question, not a sales question, which is exactly why the baseline in line E has to exist before a trial starts. The definitions behind recovery rates and the figures the industry publishes are set out on our failed payment recovery benchmarks page, so you can compare like with like.

Step 4: Compare fee shapes on your numbers

Quotes arrive in three shapes. Run each one against your line C and your realistic recovery gain — not the vendor's — and write the monthly cost at your volume, not at the volume in their example.

Fee shape	How the cost is calculated	What to watch
Flat monthly fee	One fixed amount per month, whatever you recover. Write in the quoted flat fee: [quoted flat fee].	The cost per recovered dollar falls as you recover more. Check what is included — retries, emails, SMS, and cancel deflection in one fee, or each priced separately.
Percentage of recovered revenue	Quoted percentage × the revenue recovered that month. Percentage-of-recovery models typically run 5–15% of recovered revenue. Write in the quoted percentage: [quoted %].	The fee scales with your success, which sounds aligned — but it is charged on all recovered revenue, including the baseline your existing setup would have recovered anyway, unless the contract says otherwise.
Tiered or per-session pricing	A base fee that steps up with MRR, churn volume, or sessions, sometimes with per-unit overage charges. Write in the tier you land in today and the next tier up: [tier today] / [next tier].	Model next year's tier, not just today's. Growth that raises your recovery fee automatically can quietly erase the gain the tool created. Check overage rates in writing.

Two comparison rules keep this honest. First, compare total monthly cost at the same recovered revenue — the same line F plus the same assumed gain — never fee against fee in isolation. Second, include the platform underneath: an add-on priced on top of a separate analytics or billing subscription costs the base plan plus the add-on, every month, whether it recovers or not.

Step 5: Find your break-even line

Take the fee from whichever shape you are evaluating and divide it by your line C. That percentage is the additional recovery the tool must produce, above your baseline, to break even. Write it down before any demo call: [fee] ÷ [your C] × 100 = [your break-even gain]. Then judge every claim against it. A modest break-even line at healthy failed volume means the decision is low-risk and worth testing. A break-even line in double digits at low volume means native retries plus a tidy manual process may honestly be the right answer for now — and the worksheet has still done its job, because it stopped a purchase your numbers could not support.

The bottom line

Dunning ROI is not a mystery; it is five formulas and the discipline to count only what recovery actually adds. Run this worksheet quarterly, because failed volume and ticket size drift as you grow. For reference, Swipe Again is priced in the simplest of the three shapes: $179/mo flat, no percentage of recovered revenue and no MRR tiers, with smart retries, branded dunning emails and SMS, card-update pages, and cancel deflection included — and a 14-day trial with card upfront, so the baseline from Step 1 is what a test gets measured against. However you buy, buy against your break-even line, not a pitch.

Frequently asked questions

What counts as recovered revenue in this worksheet?

Only payments that failed and then cleared because of recovery work, measured against the failed payments that started the sequence. Payments that would have cleared on a simple automatic retry belong to your baseline, not to any tool's added value. Keeping that distinction is what makes the break-even calculation honest.

How do I find my current recovery rate if I have never tracked it?

Take one complete recent month. Count the failed charges, then count how many of those same charges eventually cleared within about thirty days, and divide the second number by the first. That is your baseline recovery rate. If your billing platform cannot produce both numbers, measure manually for one month before evaluating any tool.

Is a percentage-of-recovered-revenue fee ever the better deal?

It can be at very low failed volume, where a percentage of a small recovered amount costs less than any flat fee. The worksheet shows you the crossover with your own numbers. Just make sure the percentage applies to genuinely recovered revenue and model what the fee becomes at the volume you expect next year, not only today.

What break-even recovery gain is reasonable to demand?

There is no universal figure, because it depends on your failed volume and ticket size. The worksheet's job is to make the number explicit: a tool that must add only a few points above your baseline to pay for itself is a low-risk test, while one that needs a double-digit gain is asking you to believe an exceptional claim. Demand measurement either way, during a defined test period.

How often should I rerun the ROI worksheet?

Quarterly is a good rhythm, and again whenever your subscriber count, pricing, or failed volume changes materially. Recovery economics drift as you grow: a fee shape that lost money at one volume can win at another, and a tiered fee can quietly step up. The rerun takes minutes once the first baseline exists.