Recurring payments sometimes fail - an expired card, a declined charge, or (with bank payments) insufficient funds. This is the administrator/staff playbook for getting a missed recurring gift back on track. Donors can't run these steps themselves, and CoolFocus never resubmits a missed charge on its own.
CoolFocus does not automatically retry, recover, or "catch up" a missed recurring payment. Every missed or failed period sits as a pending decision until an authorized customer user with the Recurring Contributions Update permission reviews it and chooses what happens. Silence is never treated as consent,,: if nobody reviews a period, it is never charged.
All of that review happens in one place: the CoolPay Hub (Give > CoolPay Hub). See CoolPay Hub: Reviewing and Approving Recurring Payments for the full walkthrough of the tabs, individual approvals, and batch approvals.
Run the Failed Payments report (Reports, category CoolPay) to see every failed payment attempt over a date range, broken down by failure reason and with recurring gifts called out. This is the fastest way to find donors who need follow-up without checking payments one at a time. See Reports by Area. You can also filter the Payments list itself using the built-in Failed Payments quick filter,,, see Payments and Payouts. A recurring gift with anything needing attention also shows a link straight to the CoolPay Hub on its Overview and History tabs.
For recurring gifts specifically, open Give > CoolPay Hub, stay on the Needs you tab, and look at the Failed - needs a decision group to see every billing period whose last attempt failed and still needs a decision. Clicking a failed card opens a decision dialog titled "Review failed payment" with the failure reason and Approve, Skip, Hold, or Mark fulfilled outside actions. See CoolPay Hub: Reviewing and Approving Recurring Payments.
Open the payment and read the failure reason. The most common causes are an expired or declined card, or a returned bank (ACH) payment,,, see Understanding ACH Risks in CoolPay for why ACH returns happen.
If instead a period shows a Blocked badge with no Approve option, the problem is not the failed charge playbook below, it's a hard block like an open payment issue, a duplicate recurring gift, or an unresolved schedule. Open the row to see which one and what to do about it in CoolPay Hub: Reviewing and Approving Recurring Payments.
You never type a donor's new card yourself. Instead, send a Payment Method Update link:
• From the donor's record, send the update link by email or text.
• The donor clicks it and enters their new card on a secure page.
• The link is single-use and expires (about 30 days).
Once the donor updates their method, it's available on their recurring gift. See Managing Saved Payment Methods.
With a working payment method in place, open the period in the CoolPay Hub and choose how to resolve it:
• Approve submits the payment to the processor for that exact period. Approving requires an authorization attestation, and a period that is historical (aged) or carries a risk flag (for example a recent failure) requires you to type an exact confirmation phrase before it can be approved. Approvals are tied to the period's current version, so if the period changed since you loaded it, the approval is rejected instead of silently going through.
• Skip the period so it is never charged; the gift's schedule advances normally.
• Hold the period to leave it pending without approving or skipping it yet.
• Mark fulfilled outside CoolPay to record that the donor already covered that period another way (for example check or cash) without submitting a processor charge.
Some periods are hard-blocked rather than just flagged, Approve isn't offered at all and the hub explains why and who needs to clear it. See the Blocked periods section of CoolPay Hub: Reviewing and Approving Recurring Payments for details on individual approvals and on approving several clean (non-historical, unflagged) periods at once from the Due now group.
The recurring gift's Overview tab includes a Recent History timeline of attempts, payments, contributions, and alerts. If a donor reports what looks like a duplicate charge, use this timeline instead of guessing:
• Each entry shows small detail tags such as the payment ID, contribution ID, billing period, reconciliation status, and payment method, so you can confirm whether two entries are actually the same underlying charge or genuinely separate ones.
• Hover the info icon on an entry for extra context, like a processor error or a refund reason, when one is available.
• Click an entry with a linked payment or contribution to jump straight to that record and verify the amount and date before taking any action.
CoolFocus also has safeguards that hold a billing period for review instead of submitting a duplicate charge when a matching payment or contribution already exists for that donor and billing period. If you see a period sitting in a reconciliation-required or review-required state, check Recent History first, then resolve it in the CoolPay Hub. A reconciliation hold only blocks the specific billing period the alert was raised against, so a hold from an earlier month does not keep blocking the donor's current or future periods once that period has passed. An open alert only blocks the specific billing period it was raised about, so a hold from an earlier period does not keep blocking later periods once the gift has moved past it.
Each card in the CoolPay Hub also carries a one-line summary of the gift's payment history, and flags a period when its recent payments landed in the same calendar month, before you approve it.
You don't have to leave the Recent History timeline to check this either: the contribution record created from a recurring charge has its own read-only Covers Period field (for example "May 2026") on its detail view, showing which billing period that specific charge pays for. If an approved charge settles in a different month than it was due, Covers Period makes it clear the charge isn't a duplicate of that month's regular gift. See Donors and Contributions for details.
• CoolPay Hub: Reviewing and Approving Recurring Payments
• Managing a Recurring Gift
• Managing Saved Payment Methods
• Refunding a Payment
