Autopay and saved payment methods

Autopay lets a household's dues invoice get paid automatically from a saved bank account. It ships off for every club and has to be armed before any household can use it.

Autopay is an org-level switch, separate from any one household's opt-in.

1. Open Admin › Renewals.

2. Find the Autopay card and turn it on. The card shows how many households are currently opted in.

Until you arm it, the household-side "turn autopay on" control in the member portal has nothing to attach to. A household can save a bank account, but autopay itself only runs once the org switch is on.

Separate from the per-club switch above, Admin › Ops has a "Pause autopay charges" control that is platform-wide, not club-specific. It's an incident-response lever, not a routine setting: while engaged, the daily autopay run stops completely for every club on the platform, no charges and no notices, until an admin disengages it there. (Notices pause too, deliberately, so a household is never told a charge date the pause would then miss.)

If a club's autopay switch is on and households are enrolled, but a run produced no charges or notices at all, check Admin › Ops for an engaged pause before assuming a per-household cause.

From the member portal's Payment methods page, a household:

1. Adds a bank account through Add a bank account, which opens Stripe's secure setup. The platform never sees the account or routing number, only the last four digits.

2. Turns autopay on and picks the account to charge.

3. Optionally sets a charge date (MM-DD). Left blank, the default is 10 days before the dues deadline configured in Settings.

Saving a payment method and authorizing it for off-session (autopay) charges are two different things. A method only becomes autopay-chargeable once it captured mandate consent. That happens during Stripe's setup flow, or during a checkout where the member checked "remember this account." A method attached any other way still shows as saved, but the portal won't offer it for autopay because it isn't chargeable off-session.

If a household says a saved account "isn't showing up" as an autopay option, that's almost always the reason. Have them re-save the account through Add a bank account rather than assume something is broken.

Autopay sends an email notice before charging, with an additional text for eligible opted-in recipients. Normally the notice is scheduled ten days before the charge. Late enrollment can shorten that window: the charge waits until a later daily run, more than 20 hours after the recorded notice time. The portal therefore promises advance notice, not ten days for every household.

If no household email is accepted for sending, the notice is retried on a later run instead of advancing to the charge. Acceptance by the email provider is not proof of inbox delivery; do not promise that every household member received or read it.

Two things to have straight before you explain a failed pull to a household:

A failed ACH pull is not retried. When an autopay charge fails (insufficient funds, a bank return), the platform does not re-attempt that invoice — autopay's one attempt at it is spent. The invoice stays open and has to be paid another way: the household pays it from the portal, or staff record a payment. Don't tell a household "it'll try again tomorrow" — it won't. (The only thing that retries is creating the charge in the first place after a network error, before any charge existed.)

Two consecutive failed autopay charges on a household automatically:

• Turn autopay off for that household, and

• Clear the saved payment method that was selected for autopay.

An automatic email lets the household know autopay was disabled. To reset the failure count and let the method be used for autopay again, the household needs a successful autopay-tagged charge on it. An ordinary manual payment on the same invoice does not reset the counter or re-arm the method. In practice that usually means the household re-saves a working bank account and turns autopay back on for the next cycle.

The list of saved payment methods on a household is not itself the source of truth. It mirrors what Stripe reports. Additions and removals both flow through Stripe webhooks. If a member removes a card or bank account from the portal, or it's removed on the Stripe side (e.g., detached, expired), the local list converges to match either way. Whichever side acts first, the other catches up.