Handling a failed or returned payment

What happens when a rent payment is declined or returned: how Aptoria retries, notifies the tenant, surfaces the NSF fee for your approval, and stops autopay after a hard reversal.

Bank payments can come back — insufficient funds, a closed account, a decline. When that happens Aptoria marks the payment late, notifies the tenant that the pull did not go through, and begins following up over the next several days so they can pay another way. Nothing is hidden: the failure and the reason are recorded on the payment.

This is a normal, handled case, not an error state you have to untangle. The tenant's balance stays open and visible, and the reminder sequence takes over from there.

A failed automatic pull is retried on a measured schedule rather than immediately or repeatedly. The system waits between attempts, and after a few failures it stops retrying and hands the situation to you instead of pounding a bank account that clearly is not funded — which also avoids stacking up returned-payment fees.

The follow-up messages ride the same discipline as ordinary reminders: rate-limited, inside quiet hours, and paused if the charge is disputed or the unit is on a habitability hold. So a returned payment triggers firm follow-up, not an endless loop.

A returned bank payment can carry an NSF (returned-payment) fee. Aptoria does not apply that fee on its own — it surfaces it to you to approve or dismiss in the approval queue, so a fee for a bounced payment is your call, not an automatic penalty.

A hard reversal is treated more seriously than a simple retry. A chargeback or an ACH return deactivates the standing autopay authorization, so nothing keeps re-pulling against a closed or disputed account. The tenant re-links their bank and re-enables autopay when they are ready, and until then rent falls back to on-demand payment.