One unpaid invoice or a whole aged ledger — recovered on a fixed fee, with the interest and compensation added before anything is sent.
Commercial debt collection is recovering money owed by one business to another. It covers a single invoice a customer has stopped paying and it covers an aged ledger with forty entries on it that nobody has had time to work through since March.
We take both, on fixed fees. The difference between them is not the law, it is the triage — with one debt you go straight at it, and with a ledger the first job is deciding which entries are worth what.
An aged debtors report is not a list of equally valuable claims, and treating it as one is how businesses spend money recovering the debts that were going to pay anyway. Sorted properly, most ledgers fall into four groups.
We will do that sort with you before quoting for anything, because the fee should attach to the debts where it changes the outcome.
Per debt, in order: confirm the debtor entity and that the debt is in time; calculate the statutory interest and compensation; draft and send the letter before action under the right regime; handle the response, whether that is payment, an offer, a dispute or silence; and put a recommendation in front of you at the point where the next step costs real money.
What it is not is a call centre chasing your customers by telephone until they give in. That is a different trade, it is priced on commission, and it carries risks to a commercial relationship that are worth thinking about before you buy it.
Most commercial debt collection in the UK is sold on commission — the collector takes an agreed percentage of whatever is recovered. It is an easy thing to buy, because it feels like it costs nothing if it fails.
The problem is what it does to the incentives on the debts that were straightforward. A £40,000 invoice that pays on the first letter costs you the same percentage as one that took a year, three letters and a judgment — and the collector is paid most where the work was least. It also means the money you recover is not the money you were owed.
We charge for the work. Fees are agreed in writing before anything starts, and if a debt turns out to need less work than expected the fee reflects that. Where the debtor is a business, a good part of what you spend is recoverable from them anyway — see the pricing page for what is added to the debt rather than borne by you.
No, but there is a point below which the arithmetic stops working and we will tell you where it is for your debt. On a very small invoice against a company with no assets, the fee plus the court fee can exceed what you would realistically get back. On a very small invoice against a solvent company that simply has not paid, a letter is often all it takes and is well worth it.
Sometimes, and it is a fair question rather than a squeamish one. Our view is that a customer who only continues trading with you because you do not enforce payment terms is not a customer, it is an unsecured loan. But the judgement is yours, and we will tell you where a firmer credit control approach would get the money without the relationship damage — that is what credit control is for.
Not directly, and we would rather say so than take the instruction. Cross-border enforcement is a specialist field with its own rules on jurisdiction and recognition of judgments, and it changed materially after Brexit. Where the debtor is a UK entity with an overseas parent there is often more to work with than people assume, and that is worth a conversation.
The invoice, the order or contract if one exists, the customer's name exactly as it appears on your paperwork, and a short note of what has been said. For a ledger, an aged debtors report exported from your accounting system is enough to begin the triage.
The letter-before-action checklist, the interest and compensation rules, and the escalation ladder with what each step costs. One email, no sequence.
Tell us what you are owed and who owes it. You get back what the debt is actually worth once interest and compensation are added, what we would do first, and the fixed fee for doing it.