by Bobby Mills
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by Bobby Mills
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If you’ve ever chased payments, you’ll know it’s not the most rewarding part of running an activity business or club
Whether you’re organising grassroots football, dance lessons, or a local gym programme, collecting fees month after month takes time — and often, it’s time given freely by volunteers. Invoices, reminders, awkward follow-ups… it’s all admin that gets in the way of building your community
Why switch to automated subscriptions with Hivelink?
Hivelink’s subscription tools take that entire process and automate it — collecting payments on schedule, updating records instantly, and retrying any failed transactions automatically.
Recently, we tracked a typical payment run from a group of clients on the Hivelink Network — from sports clubs to education providers — all used Hivelink to automate their recurring payments.
Across 1,496 active subscriptions, they collected £83,303, with 98.5% requiring almost no administration.
Here’s how it happened.
Monthly payments collected on the 1st of the month, Maximum retry policy (8 attempts over 14 days).
Clients ranged from new users to those entering their third season. The tracked payment was also the first payment in a new subscription.
Hivelink Subscription Statuses
The statuses tracked in this study were all at active at the point of the payment run:
Active
Subscription has future payments scheduled.
Paused
Payment collection is currently paused
Retrying
A scheduled payment has failed and is currently in the retry loop
Complete
The subscription has no future payments scheduled or was paid in full at creation.
Failed
All attempts for the the last scheduled payment failed
Cancelled
The subscription was cancelled by the customer (or an admin on their behalf)
Pinch, punch first of the Month.
Clients can set a preferred time for the payment to be taken. In our data set these ranged from 04:00am through to 6:30pm. Over the course of the day, Hivelink processed 1,496 scheduled payments.
Of these 1,387 payments succeeded automatically — with a total order value of £76,870 on the way to clients’ bank accounts. Every customer received a confirmation email, and each client got a matching copy for their records.
The total client input up to this point? Nothing. No manual chasing. No spreadsheets. Just… done.
Day 1 automatic payment success rate
Another 109 payments (worth £6,433) failed on the first attempt — not unusual when collecting payments at scale. These were automatically marked as Retrying and entered the 14-day retry schedule.
Days 1–7: Automation doing the heavy lifting
Over the next week, Hivelink quietly got to work.
Each failed payment is automatically retried based on the client’s schedule. If a retry succeeds, the customer and client were both notified instantly, and the subscription’s status switched back to Active.
Meanwhile, any customers whose payments continued to fail received a customisable email with a friendly reminder and a link to make a manual payment.
The advice we give our clients during this stage is simple: sit back and let the system do its thing.
By Day 7, the numbers spoke for themselves:
Days 8–14: Minimal effort, maximum recovery
By the second week, the focus is on trying to save as many of the remaining subscriptions as possible. By now customers will have received multiple emails from each attempt and it may be time to review the reasons for the failures and intervene where needed.
The vast majority of failures are insufficient funds, though occasionally a card may be reported lost or stolen, expired or the bank simply declined the transaction – in these cases the payment is unlikely to ever succeed without the customer taking action.
At this stage, some clients reach out directly — maybe with a quick call or a chat at the next training session — while others simply let the retry cycle finish.
In our sample, only 8 payments remained unpaid from the original 1,496. That’s 0.5% of the total.
Most clients offer these customers a direct link to a new product that will take the missed payment on setup, with optional admin fee, and then create a new monthly subscription that is transferred back into their original plan.
What this means in real terms
When you run a community club or coaching business, this kind of efficiency makes a world of difference.
Across these nine organisations, Hivelink delivered:
For volunteers and staff alike, that means less time behind a laptop — and more time focusing on things that matter.
See the benefit of subscription-based models for yourself
Whether you’re managing a local sports club, a dance school, or a private coaching programme, Hivelink helps you take control of your payments and grow with confidence.
Whether you run a club, camp, or coaching business, Hivelink makes it simple to turn occasional customers into loyal members.
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