Recurring Payments

I'm trying to understand the different ways of handling recurring payments. My service basically bills customers monthly. We've set it up so when the members sign up, their credit card data is passed directly to our credit card vendor. They're billed and then rebilled every 30 days.

The problem is that when the credit card fails to go thru on one of the recurring billings, we have no automated way of having the information passed back into our system. Also, when members cancel, we need to manually go into our credit card system and cancel the member.

There are also problems around credit card updates in that these are handled as cancellations and new accounts, not just as a credit card update. So our records get all messed up.

When I inquire about to automate these things, I'm told that we should switch to batch processing. The credit cards can still be kept at the vendors but we'll have to submit a daily list of people to bill.

Any ideas or articles to point me to which discuss these issues?