Payment failures or delays
Horizon: 10 days before churn. The shortest-horizon signal (10 days). Expired card, ACH rejection, or invoice 10+ days past due. Often a leading indicator of deliberate budget reallocation, not administrative friction.
How to detect it
Stripe / payment-gateway webhook OR QuickBooks A/R aging report. Flag on first hard failure + any invoice unpaid >10 days. Soft declines (insufficient funds once) do not fire the signal.
Recommended intervention playbook
48-hour contact SLA. First touch: operational (is the card on file updated?). If operational root cause denied or dismissed, escalate to commercial: is this a deliberate non-renewal signal? Offer payment-term extension (net-60) or usage-based step-down plan to salvage.
Industries where this signal is strongest
- Fintech
- Construction
- Logistics
- Legal Tech
- Martech
Other universal churn signals
- Login frequency decline (horizon: 45d)
- Champion / sponsor departure (horizon: 75d)
- Feature adoption breadth decline (horizon: 50d)
- Support ticket volume spike (horizon: 21d)
Track this signal with ChurnDefense
ChurnDefense ingests your product + CRM + billing data and fires this signal automatically when the detection thresholds trip. No manual dashboard auditing. Every alert is explainable — you see which threshold fired, when, and which account.