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Glossary of Recovery Measurement Terms

Every term Churn Buster uses to measure failed payment recovery and cancel flow saves, with the formulas for recovery rate, save rate, and natural variance.

Complete cohorts. Every outcome counted. Every term below serves those two rules.

(dunning) marks a term for failed payment recovery, (cancel flow) marks one for cancellation sessions, and a term with no marker applies to both.

Abandoned

(cancel flow) A cancel flow session where the customer left without cancelling or accepting a save offer. The subscription stays active. We track abandoned sessions but exclude them from the save rate denominator because there's no clear outcome to attribute.

Active (In Progress)

(dunning) A campaign that hasn't reached a final state yet. Its outcome is unknown, so it doesn't count as recovered or lost, and the cohort it belongs to stays incomplete until it resolves.

Campaign (Recovery Campaign)

(dunning) The recovery sequence triggered when a subscription payment fails. It begins with the failure and ends in one of the four outcomes, or exits as a voided campaign when the underlying charge no longer exists.

See also: The Four Outcomes

Cancel Flow

(cancel flow) A real-time, session based system that intercepts cancellation attempts and presents save offers. Outcomes resolve within a single session, with no in-progress state and no cohort waiting period.

Cancellation

Name the frame before you use the word.

(dunning) The customer actively cancelled the subscription while a recovery campaign was running. Counts as Lost in the recovery rate denominator.

(cancel flow) A session where the customer completed the cancellation through the flow. Counts as Lost in the save rate denominator.

Card Update

(dunning) Recovery via the customer updating their payment method, where the new method succeeded. Counts as Recovered.

See also: The Four Outcomes

Cohort (Daily Cohort)

(dunning) A daily cohort is every campaign that started on a given calendar date. Cohorts are assigned at start and never change. A campaign that started on March 12 belongs to the March 12 cohort even if it doesn't resolve until April 15.

Cohort Day

(dunning) The calendar date that anchors a cohort. A complete cohort day is one where every campaign that started that day has reached a final state.

Complete Cohort

(dunning) A cohort is complete when the last in-progress campaign in it reaches a final state. Until then, no recovery rate is published for that date. Final states are the four outcomes plus voided.

Count-Based

(dunning) A recovery rate calculated on number of campaigns rather than dollar value. Removes subscription value as a variable, which makes it the right lens for comparing across time, segments, and cohorts.

Dollar-Weighted

(dunning) A recovery rate calculated as dollars recovered divided by dollars at risk, rather than number of campaigns. Reflects business impact more directly than count-based. Both formulations are canonical; they weight the same outcomes differently.

Failed Payment

(dunning) The trigger event for a campaign. Your billing platform reported a failed charge.

Incremental Lift

(dunning) The change in recovery rate caused by a change to your recovery process, relative to a baseline measured before the change. Requires a rolling analysis baseline captured before any optimization, or pre-change daily cohorts, ideally with all four outcomes broken out.

Lost

(dunning) A campaign that ended without recovery. Either Cancellation or Passive Churn. Lost campaigns stay in the denominator.

See also: The Four Outcomes

Natural Variance

(dunning) Natural variance is how much your recovery rate swings from one period to the next when nothing about your recovery process has changed. It shows most clearly month to month, where the swings are largest; rolling analysis is how you diminish them. We measure it as the gap between the highest and lowest comparable period in your complete history for a stable recovery process, not a standard deviation, not a confidence interval.

Natural Variance = Highest Period Recovery Rate - Lowest Period Recovery Rate

Period = the unit you're comparing, a calendar month or a rolling window, held constant across the calculation
Highest / Lowest Period Recovery Rate = the recovery rates of the best and worst comparable periods in your complete history
Comparable periods = periods measured with the same recovery process, made only of complete cohort days

A typical account swings 20-30 points between its best and worst rolling window over a multi-year history.

Passive Churn

(dunning) A campaign that reached the end of its recovery window without a successful payment and without an active cancellation. The customer lapsed silently. Counts as Lost.

See also: The Four Outcomes

Recovered

(dunning) A campaign that ended in a successful payment. Either Card Update or Successful Retry.

See also: The Four Outcomes

Recovery Rate

(dunning) The share of campaigns in complete cohort days that ended in a successful payment. Available count-based or dollar-weighted.

Recovery Rate = Recovered Campaigns / All Campaigns in Complete Cohort Days

Recovered Campaigns = Card Update + Successful Retry
All Campaigns = Recovered + Lost (Cancellation + Passive Churn). Voided campaigns are excluded.
Complete Cohort Days = dates where every campaign has reached a final state (recovered, lost, or voided)

Rolling Window

(dunning) A span of N consecutive days. We calculate and plot every possible window in your history, so a 30 day window means April 1 to April 30, then April 2 to May 1, one window per start date. Rolling windows handle resolution lag and smooth natural variance, and the sweet spot is usually 30-45 days once history has built.

Save

(cancel flow) A cancel flow session where the customer accepted a save offer (pause, swap, discount, content) and remained subscribed.

Save Rate

(cancel flow) The share of decided cancel flow sessions that ended in a save.

Save Rate = Saves / (Cancelled + Saved)

Saves = sessions where the customer accepted a save offer and remained subscribed
Cancelled = sessions where the customer completed the cancellation through the flow
Abandoned sessions are tracked but excluded from the denominator.

Session

(cancel flow) A single instance of a customer entering the cancel flow. The unit of measurement for cancel flows, analogous to a campaign in dunning. Every session exits with a definite result, and the three primary results are Cancelled, Saved, and Abandoned.

Source Attribution

(dunning) Which retry or channel produced a given recovery. Identifiable from exports, often by enriching campaign data with subscription platform or payment processor data; useful for troubleshooting, never a headline metric. A successful payment is a successful payment, whether it came from a card update, a retry we ran, or a retry the platform ran.

See also: The Four Outcomes

Started

(dunning) The number of campaigns that began on a given date or in a given period. Equivalent to failed payments processed.

Successful Retry

(dunning) Recovery via the original payment method succeeding on a retry, whether we ran the retry or the platform did, without a card update. Counts as Recovered.

See also: The Four Outcomes

Voided Campaign

(dunning) A campaign where the customer or merchant cancelled the underlying order (skip, pause, or delay) without ending the subscription. The charge no longer exists, so the campaign is excluded from the recovery rate denominator for its cohort day. Voided is the only final state that does not count in the denominator.