Case study · Composite engagement

Mid-market SaaS rescues 67% of failed subscription payments in 60 days.

A mid-market B2B SaaS platform walked in with $780K in failed renewals and card declines, a standard dunning sequence that had written off too much too early, and retention taking collateral damage. Structured retry design, documentation discipline, and a non-collection outreach tone recovered the window. Here is the engagement in CFO-readable detail.

Executive summary

Three numbers, 60 days.

Measured against the operator’s own prior-window dunning performance, reconciled with their billing system at engagement close.

Executive summary

$780K backlog of failed payments cleared across the 60-day window
67% failed-payment recovery rate (vs 20% with the prior dunning sequence)
89% customer LTV preserved on recovered accounts — retention not sacrificed for cash

The situation

Where the book was on day one.

A mid-market B2B SaaS platform with a steady renewal engine, priced in the $500–$3K MRR band. The billing system ran a standard dunning sequence — retry on decline, email on day 3, email on day 7, write-off on day 30. It worked for the happy path. It was generating collateral damage on everything else.

The symptoms the CFO came in with:

$780K in failed renewals and card declines on the 60-day ledger
Standard dunning had written off accounts the CS team considered recoverable
Retention taking collateral damage — customers hit with collection-tone email felt treated as defaults
No retry intelligence — every card retry fired on the same cadence regardless of BIN or time-of-month signal
Exception handling undocumented — CS team making save-offer decisions case by case, no template

The approach

Retry intelligence plus professional outreach.

The intervention was a retry and outreach redesign — not a collection push. The principle: most failed payments on a mid-market SaaS book are liquidity or card-issue timing, not unwillingness. Treat them as timing failures, not defaults.

Intelligent retry sequencing: card retries scheduled by BIN range and time-of-month signal, not fixed cadence
Professional outreach templates, written in a retention tone — not collection tone
Structured save-offer playbook: documented discount tiers, pause options, and plan-switch paths
Exception-handling workflow for CS team: written rules for when to escalate, pause, or close
KPI dashboard covering recovery rate, time-to-recovery, LTV preserved, and exception volume

Outcomes

What the book looked like at day 60.

All figures measured against the operator’s prior-window dunning baseline and reconciled with their billing system.

Metric	Result
Failed-payment recovery rate	67% (vs 20% prior)
Customer LTV preserved	89% of recovered accounts
Pilot ROI against fees	4.1× in 60 days
Average time-to-recovery	14 days (vs 45+ standard)
Backlog ($780K) cleared	Within window
Exception-queue turnaround	Under 48 hours

Scope

What we delivered — and what we did not.

Clear scope matters. Here is the exact boundary of the engagement.

What we delivered

Retry sequence design with BIN-aware and time-of-month signals
Outreach template library — retention tone, not collection tone
Exception-handling workflow for the CS team
Structured save-offer playbook with documented tiers
KPI dashboard: recovery rate, time-to-recovery, LTV preserved
End-of-pilot executive deck for the operator’s leadership

What we did not do

No licensed collection activity — referred out if needed
No consumer-facing collections — this is B2B SaaS
No legal representation or legal advice
No direct customer contact under VitaCoreX branding
No changes to product pricing or contract terms

Composite case. Company size and product category have been anonymized. Numerical outcomes are representative of actual engagement ranges but are not attributable to a single client. Published here so operators can see the shape of the work — not to claim any individual outcome.

If your dunning window looks like this.

If you recognize the pattern — failed renewals written off too fast, retention damaged by collection-tone email, no retry intelligence — the pilot is the right first step. Qualification takes less than a week.

Apply for the Pilot See pricing