If your paperwork is right the goods may still be yours. If it is not, you are an unsecured creditor — and the difference is a clause most suppliers have never had checked.
Supplying goods on credit gives you one advantage over a services business: if your paperwork is right, the goods may still be yours. It also gives you a characteristic failure mode — the customer whose orders grow while their payments slow.
A properly drafted and properly incorporated retention of title clause can keep ownership with you until payment. When a trade customer fails, it is the single most valuable thing a supplier can have — the difference between being an unsecured creditor at the back of the queue and recovering your stock.
It has to survive contact with reality: the clause must be incorporated into the contract, the goods must be identifiable, and they must not have been sold on or incorporated into something else. Extended and 'all monies' clauses go further but are more easily defeated by poor drafting. If you supply goods on credit and you are not sure yours works, that is worth an hour of a lawyer's time now rather than a total loss later.
Orders increasing while payments slow is the classic signal, and it is often misread as growth. A customer who cannot get credit elsewhere concentrates their buying on the supplier who has not yet noticed. By the time the account is reviewed, exposure is at its peak.
The defence is a credit limit that is actually enforced, and a rule that orders stop when it is breached — which is a systems decision rather than a legal one.
Wholesale ledgers reward triage. A handful of accounts usually carry most of the value, and the long tail is often better served by consistent credit control than by escalation. We sort before quoting, so the fee attaches to the debts where it changes the outcome.
Only under a retention of title clause that is properly incorporated, where the goods are identifiable and unsold, and you must not force entry or breach the peace. If an insolvency practitioner has been appointed, raise it with them immediately and in writing — delay is what usually loses the claim.
Stop supplying on credit today, and treat it as urgent rather than awkward. Rising orders alongside slowing payment is the most reliable warning sign there is, and every further delivery increases what you lose.
We cannot tell you without reading it, and drafting one is contract work rather than recovery work — that sits with Buzz Legal on a fixed fee. What we can tell you is how yours would fare against the debt you are chasing now.
Then the compensation sums alone are material, and the right answer is probably a triage plus consistent credit control rather than a hundred letters. Send the aged debtors report.
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.