Managing Expiring Credit Cards

Salesforce Billing best practices recommend deactivating expired credit cards to avoid rejections from payment attempts against an expired card. You don't have to delete related payment methods, since existing payments can still map back to a payment method. Many payment gateways offer credit card updating services that reduce payments against expired credit cards. These services update credit card numbers when users receive new cards expiration date extensions.

Some payment gateway offer services that update near-expired credit cards that your customers have saved on file. Depending on your configuration, the update process occurs at the gateway (if the gateway is serving as the vault) or Salesforce may be integrated with your gateway. You can also prompt users to update their credit cards as they get closer to their expiration dates. You can also make a Salesforce workflow that sends emails to your customers, or you can prompt the customer from your customer portal. If you’re prompting your customers, make sure that you only prompt users with an active subscription, and avoid prompting customers to update inactive credit cards.

You can also make a workflow that updates payment methods to inactive as they expire, preventing these cards from moving to the payment gateway as part of your payment collection process. If the expiring payment method on the account is the default payment method, the customer must choose a new payment method or enter a new card. Consider building this logic into the Salesforce workflow.