Triage failed Recurly payments by how much revenue is at risk

When Recurly sends a failed_payment_notification webhook, triage the failed payment instead of dumping a raw alert into Slack. Use the account code and the transaction id from the webhook payload as the starting point for everything below.

First, use Recurly Get Transaction to pull the decline details for the failed transaction: the amount, the currency, the decline reason or error code, the payment method, and whether it was a recurring charge. Then build a picture of the account. Use Recurly Get Account Balance to read the current outstanding balance and whether the account is already past due. Use Recurly List Account Subscriptions to total the active recurring revenue at risk, normalizing each active subscription to a monthly figure so that plans billed annually and monthly are comparable. Use Recurly List Account Invoices to check whether this is a repeat failure for the same customer, counting past due or previously failed invoices in the last 90 days.

Next, look the customer up in HubSpot using Search Contacts, matching on the email address from the Recurly account. Read the contact owner and the lifecycle stage. If the contact has an owner, use HubSpot Get Owner to resolve that owner id into a real name and email, so the Slack message can name a person rather than an opaque id. If no contact matches, carry on anyway and state clearly in the alert that the customer was not found in the CRM.

Decide a risk tier before writing anything. Treat the failure as high risk if any one of these is true: the monthly recurring revenue at risk is at or above $500, the account is already past due, or this is a repeat failure for the same customer within the last 90 days. Otherwise treat it as a low risk one off decline. Keep that threshold in one obvious place near the top of the workflow so it is easy to change.

Post the result with Slack Bot Send a Message, and lead every message with the tier so it is readable at a glance. High risk failures go to a dedicated revenue risk channel and must name the HubSpot owner and their lifecycle stage, the monthly recurring revenue at risk, the decline reason, whether the account is past due, and how many times this customer has failed before. Low risk one off declines go to a quieter billing channel as a single short line: customer, amount, decline reason. Use Slack formatting, where a single asterisk means bold, not standard Markdown.

For high risk failures only, also create a HubSpot Task using Create Task, assigned to the contact owner you resolved, due two business days out. Give it a subject naming the customer and the amount at risk, and a body summarizing the decline reason, the recurring revenue at risk, the past due status and the failure history. Associate the task with the contact so it shows up on the record. If the contact has no owner, still create the task and leave it unassigned rather than skipping it. The point is that recovery on a high value account is tracked as real work instead of scrolling away in a channel.

Keep it to one Slack message per failed payment event, and never post the same failure to both channels. If any Recurly or HubSpot lookup fails, still post the alert with whatever detail is available and note what could not be retrieved, because a partial alert is far better than silence on a failed payment.