CoolPay Hub is where staff review and approve upcoming recurring payments before they go out. Nothing is sent to the bank until someone on your team with permission approves it, or chooses another action like skip or hold.
Find CoolPay Hub under Give → CoolPay Hub. It appears first in the CoolPay group with a shield check icon. A Missed Payments alert elsewhere in Give can also take you straight into the hub.
Approval uses the Recurring Contributions Update permission. Anyone with that permission can approve, including regular staff and staff-support or impersonation sessions.
Use the view tabs to narrow the queue:
Ready to decide — periods that are due now and waiting on a first approval, plus failed periods that still need a decision. This is the default view. It can also include approved periods that never actually reached the processor (for example when recurring processing is paused).
Upcoming — periods that are not due yet. CoolPay Hub shows these up to 30 days ahead so you can see what is coming, but you cannot approve or charge a period before its due date.
Processing — charges already on the way to the bank, plus any Stuck — re-submit charge rows that were approved but never reached the processor. Use Re-submit on stuck rows to retry the same approval (it does not create a new decision). Everything else here is waiting on the bank — no action needed unless it fails.
Held — paused until someone takes them off hold.
Failed — the last charge attempt failed and needs a decision. This view only appears when there is something failed to work.
All — every period, regardless of status.
Each row shows what you need to judge the payment without opening it:
Frequency (Monthly, Biweekly, and so on)
Covered period (for example "July 2026"), with the due date as secondary detail
The donor's last few recent payments, each with process date, amount, and covered period
If recent payments all processed in the same calendar month, the row shows a soft catch-up cue. That often happens when a held or delayed gift settles alongside newer periods (for example three charges in July that cover May, June, and July). The cue does not block approval — it just asks you to confirm the payments are separate periods, not duplicates.
The donor name links to the donor record. Rows with a last settled payment or a failed attempt also link to that payment so you can confirm the amount without leaving the queue.
Each row has a checkbox. The checkbox in a section header selects or clears every eligible payment in that section. You can also click Select eligible to check every clean period currently visible in the view.
Clean means:
Due now
Eligible to approve
Not hard-blocked
Not flagged for individual review
Periods that still need a closer look, have risk flags, failed attempts, or are not yet due are never auto-selected — even in the All view.
Click Approve N selected to open the batch confirmation. Approving a batch still requires typing the exact confirmation phrase for the selected count and total.
Click anywhere on a row to open its decision dialog. Along with the amount, frequency, due date, and payment method, you will see:
Recent payments for this gift (date, amount, covered period, and status) — use this to avoid a duplicate charge
A catch-up warning when recent payments landed in the same calendar month
For a failed period, the dialog title becomes Review failed payment and shows the failure reason so you can approve again, skip, or hold with context
The Approve and submit button is green. Approving submits that one period only. It does not approve any future periods for the same gift.
CoolFocus submits approved charges in the background. If the processor rate-limits the submission (for example "Too many requests"), CoolFocus keeps the period approved and queued, does not email the donor, and automatically retries. Recovery starts within a few minutes and also runs in a daily sweep. You do not need to re-approve in those cases.
Approval is not the same as submission. If a row shows an approved decision but the status is still queued, you may see Not submitted — check pause or retry.
Common causes:
Recurring processing is paused for your whole organization
Recurring processing is paused for that donor's account
When a pause blocks submission, CoolFocus opens an alert and writes a processing log entry. You can see the open alert on the recurring gift's Recent History timeline. Clear the pause, then approve or retry the period from the hub.
Skip — moves the gift to its next scheduled date without charging this period
Hold — pauses the period until someone removes it from hold
Mark fulfilled outside CoolPay — use when the donor already gave another way for that period
If approving one past-due period would cause a second non-current-period charge on the same gift to land the same day, CoolFocus defers the second one. You will see a Recovery spaced entry in Recent History. The current-period charge due today is never delayed. The deferred period stays in the hub and becomes eligible again after about 7 days.
The hub decides when a period is due using your organization's time zone on the server — not your browser's clock. That affects Ready to decide vs Upcoming, and what can be approved:
Upcoming lists pending periods that are not yet due in your org's local time
You cannot approve a period until it is due locally. Approve and Select eligible stay unavailable for not-yet-due periods. You can still open a row to review details
Overnight edge case: if it is already the next day in UTC, but not yet the next day in your organization's time zone, the period stays in Upcoming and cannot be approved yet
