---
title: What is Dunning?
url: https://markin.ai/glossary/dunning
category: Retention and churn
---

# Dunning

> Dunning is the sequence of retries and communications that recovers a failed payment: retry timing, card-update prompts, alternative payment methods and grace periods. It is a decisioning problem, because the best retry schedule differs by issuer, amount and customer history.

## Why it matters for ARPU

Recovered payments are full-margin revenue with no acquisition cost, and dunning improvements typically show up in ARPU within a single billing cycle.

## Related terms

- [Voluntary vs involuntary churn](https://markin.ai/glossary/voluntary-churn), Voluntary churn is a customer deciding to leave.
- [Churn rate](https://markin.ai/glossary/churn-rate), Churn rate is the share of customers, or of revenue, lost in a period.
- [Gross revenue retention](https://markin.ai/glossary/gross-revenue-retention), Gross revenue retention measures how much starting cohort revenue survives a period counting only losses: churn and downgrades, never expansion.
- [Real-time decisioning](https://markin.ai/glossary/real-time-decisioning), Real-time decisioning evaluates a customer's current context and returns an action within the latency budget of the moment, typically tens of milliseconds inside an app or call.

## Go deeper

- [Fintech](https://markin.ai/industries/fintech), Payment health as a growth lever.
- [Retention decisioning](https://markin.ai/solutions/retention-decisioning), Involuntary churn, handled per customer.

Source: https://markin.ai/glossary/dunning