Manual dunning

Overdue balance payment

When a customer has some invoices past their due date, their overdue balance becomes positive, and you can request its payment manually.

Premium feature ✨This feature is only available to users with a premium license. Please contact us to get access to Lago Cloud and Lago Self-Hosted Premium.

Dashboard
API

In the customer view, a Request payment link appears within the overdue balance warning.

Overdue balance warning on a customer, with the Request payment link — Request payment for the overdue balance

Click it to open a panel where you can:

Review the invoices included in the overdue balance,
Review the email sent if the payment fails, or if no payment provider is linked,
Confirm you want to request the payment.

Payment request panel listing the overdue invoices and the email preview — Preview the overdue balance payment request

You can create a payment request for the overdue balance from the API, targeting the invoices you want paid.

LAGO_URL="https://api.getlago.com"
API_KEY="__YOUR_API_KEY__"

curl --location --request POST "$LAGO_URL/api/v1/payment_requests" \
--header "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
  "payment_request": {
    "lago_invoice_ids": ["4064eff9-e7a6-4692-a289-15d7d5da9b83", "b1f36d2f-8ea6-4192-9407-8e87ba5c28c2"],
    "external_customer_id": "5eb02857-a71e-4ea2-bcf9-57d3a41bc6ba",
    "email": "rebecca@piedpiper.test"
  }
}'

Dunning behavior

Customer connected to a PSP
Customer not connected to a PSP

Automatic payment attempt: Lago initiates a payment intent for the specified amount through the connected PSP.
Failed payment: If the payment fails, Lago sends the customer an email with a payment request and a URL to complete the payment (excluding GoCardless).
Successful payment: On success, the attached invoices automatically reflect a succeeded payment status.

Dunning and payment methods

Dunning applies to every overdue invoice, whatever payment method was set to collect it. Choosing Manual payment on a subscription, a one-off invoice, or a top-up only tells Lago not to charge that invoice automatically when it is finalized. It does not exclude the invoice from dunning. Once the invoice is overdue, a dunning campaign groups all of the customer’s overdue invoices (one payment request per currency and per billing entity) and attempts a single automatic payment for the combined outstanding amount, using the payment provider set on the customer. If the customer has no default payment method stored in Lago, Lago falls back to a payment method already saved for that customer at the provider (with Stripe, the first one attached to the Stripe customer).

Prevent automatic charges for a customer

To make sure a customer is never charged on any payment method when one of their invoices becomes overdue, open Edit dunning behavior for this customer on the customer and select Deactivate dunning. No dunning attempt is triggered for them, so they stop receiving dunning emails as well. Leaving the customer’s default payment provider empty also prevents the charge and keeps the dunning emails, but it is not a guarantee: if a payment provider is set on that customer later, dunning can charge them again.

Introduction

Get started

Events & Usage Components

Pricing & Subscriptions

Quotes & Order Forms

Invoicing

Payments & Cash Collection

AI Agents and MCP

Data & Analytics

Revenue recognition

Resources

Manual dunning

Overdue balance payment

Dunning behavior

Dunning and payment methods

Prevent automatic charges for a customer