Recovery is what you pay for when prevention failed. This is the cheaper half.
Every debt on this website started as an invoice that was a fortnight late and nobody chased. Recovery is what you do when prevention has already failed, and it is always the more expensive of the two.
Credit control is the unglamorous alternative: chasing the ledger on a schedule, in writing, from the day an invoice goes past terms — so that the customers who were always going to pay do so at 30 days, and the ones who were not are identified in week three rather than month five.
It is almost never a competence problem. It is that chasing is nobody's actual job, it is uncomfortable, and it is the first thing to slide in a busy month. The specific failures are consistent:
We run the chase cycle as an outsourced function, on your ledger, in your name. In practice that means a defined sequence with defined trigger points rather than a stream of reminders: a pre-due courtesy note, a chase on the day terms are breached, a firmer written chase at a set interval, a call, and a defined escalation point at which the matter converts to formal recovery.
That last point is the part an ordinary credit control service cannot offer. Because recovery is the same firm, the escalation is not a handover — the letter before action is drafted by people who already have the invoice, the correspondence and the history.
You get a weekly position on the ledger: what is due, what has been chased, what has been promised, what has broken a promise, and what we think should escalate.
All of it runs in Recovery Desk, our own system — which is also where the interest and compensation get calculated correctly, and where an invoice becomes a recovery matter without anybody re-keying it.
A meaningful share of bad debt is written into the deal before any work is done. The things worth fixing once, that pay for themselves repeatedly:
Terms and guarantees are contract work rather than recovery work — that sits with Buzz Legal, the same company, on a fixed fee.
Both, and you choose the mix. The chase cycle runs in our own system, Recovery Desk, which connects to your Xero, costs every unpaid invoice at the correct statutory rate and drafts the chases with the real figures in them. You can run that yourself, or we can run it for you and take the cycle off your team entirely. Either way any invoice can be handed to us for formal recovery with one action, already costed and with the debtor already checked — which is the part no off-the-shelf receivables tool can do, because none of them has a legal escalation behind it.
Yours, unless you want otherwise. For routine credit control, a chase that arrives from your own accounts function is normal commercial correspondence and carries no signal. Switching to our name is itself an escalation, and it is worth saving for the point where you want it noticed.
Timing and intent. A collection agency is instructed once a debt has gone bad, usually on commission, and its arrival tells the customer the relationship has changed. Credit control runs continuously on the whole ledger before anything has gone wrong, and most of what it produces is simply invoices paid on time by customers you keep.
It is priced on the size of the ledger and the chase cycle you want, and agreed in writing before it starts. We do not take a percentage of what comes in.
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.