Every credit control tool tracks what you are owed. This one works out what you are entitled to add to it — and puts that number in the letter.
Every credit control tool on the market tracks what you are owed. Not one of them works out what you are entitled to add to it — and on a normal aged ledger that is a four-figure difference nobody is claiming.
So we built the thing that does. Recovery Desk is the system we run your ledger in: it costs every unpaid invoice at the correct statutory rate for the date that invoice fell due, chases on a schedule with the real figures in the letter, and escalates into formal recovery on the same file when chasing stops working.
Statutory interest is 8% over the Bank of England base rate — but not today's base rate. The rate is fixed at the reference date immediately before interest started running, and it never moves afterwards however many times the base rate changes.
An invoice that fell due in 2024 therefore still carries the 2024 rate today, which is higher. Apply the current rate to an old debt and you understate what you are owed. Every calculator we have tested does exactly that, because the rule is buried in a 2002 statutory instrument rather than anywhere obvious.
Recovery Desk holds the whole table and picks the right row per invoice. Verified 30 August 2026 — see where our figures come from.
Reads your ledger. Connect Xero and your outstanding sales invoices come across directly — no export, no stale spreadsheet. Or send an aged debtors CSV and it maps the columns from whatever your system calls them.
Costs every invoice. Statutory interest at the right rate for each one, plus the fixed compensation sum, which attaches per invoice. A customer with twenty late invoices owes twenty fixed sums — that alone is frequently more than the cost of doing something about the whole ledger.
Chases on a schedule. A defined ladder rather than whenever somebody remembers: a courtesy note before the due date, a note on day one, a firmer one at fourteen days that states the interest, and a final request at thirty that says what happens next.
Puts the real number in the letter. Not "your invoice is overdue" but "this invoice is now costing you £3.86 a day". That is the sentence that moves people, and it is the one no other tool can write because it does not know the figure.
Escalates without starting again. When chasing stops working, the invoice becomes a recovery matter on the same system, already costed, with the debtor already checked at Companies House.
Accruing at £3.86 a day, which is the figure the chase quotes. An illustration, not a quote.
Before anything escalates, the system pulls the debtor's record from Companies House: whether the company is still active, whether accounts are overdue, and whether charges are registered against it — a secured creditor ranks ahead of you.
That check is the reason we can tell you a debt is not worth chasing. A dissolved company cannot be sued without being restored to the register first, and spending on a letter to one is money for nothing.
Chases are drafted and queued, never sent automatically. Somebody reads each one before your customer does.
That is a deliberate choice and it is the opposite of how most automation is sold. A chase that goes to the wrong contact, or to a customer who paid yesterday, costs more than a chase that goes a day late. The schedule removes the excuse for not chasing; it does not remove the judgement.
The same system, and you decide how much of it you want to do yourself. Most people start on the first and move debts to the second one at a time.
Do it yourself. You run the ledger. The chases go out from your own address, in your name, on the schedule — with the statutory interest and compensation stated correctly, which is the part that is hard to do by hand. You keep the customer relationship and you keep every penny.
Or hand it to us. Any invoice, at any point, with one action. It becomes a recovery matter already costed and with the debtor already checked, and you get a letter of instruction setting out the fixed fee before anything is sent. Our fees are published, and we take no commission.
The point of putting both in one place is that the decision stops being a leap. You are not choosing a debt collector in a bad week; you are looking at a ledger where one line has stopped responding and pressing escalate on that line.
The system runs and we onboard clients onto it now — but we set the account up for you rather than you signing up on a page. That is a deliberate stage rather than a waiting list: your ledger gets connected, your chase schedule gets agreed, and you are using it. If you want it, say so and we will arrange it.
It also does not do sales invoicing, bookkeeping or cash forecasting. It reads your ledger; it does not replace it. If you want an accounts receivable platform you operate yourself there are good ones, and we would point you at them rather than pretend.
Either. Do it yourself and the chases go out from your address, in your name, on the schedule, with the interest and compensation stated correctly — you keep the relationship and every penny. Or hand any individual invoice to us with one action, at any point, and it becomes a recovery matter already costed with the debtor already checked. Most people do both: run the ledger themselves and escalate the two or three lines a quarter that have genuinely stopped responding. One honest caveat on where we are — we set the account up for you rather than you signing up on a page, so ask and we will arrange it.
You authorise a read-only connection from your own Xero, and we pull the outstanding sales invoices — the customer, the invoice number, the due date and the amount still owing. Nothing is written back to your ledger and we cannot see purchase invoices, payroll or your bank feed. The connection is read-only by design, it can be revoked from inside Xero at any time, and the access tokens are encrypted where they are stored rather than sitting in a database column in the clear.
An aged debtors CSV works just as well, and the import reads the column names your system actually produces rather than demanding a template — Xero, QuickBooks and Sage all label the same fields differently and it maps the common variants. Anything it cannot read with confidence is listed back to you with the reason rather than guessed at, because a misread due date silently changes the statutory rate and therefore the amount claimed. That is the one place in this whole system where a guess would cost you money.
Yours, by default. For routine credit control a chase that arrives from your own accounts function is ordinary commercial correspondence and carries no signal; replies come back to you. Switching to our name is itself an escalation, and it is worth saving for the point where you want it noticed. Either way nothing is sent until a person has read the draft — the schedule removes the excuse for not chasing, not the judgement about what should go to a particular customer.
They are good at what they do, which is reminding people. The difference is the arithmetic and what sits behind it. They track what you are owed; none of them computes the statutory interest and compensation you are entitled to add, because that means holding a rate table by period and knowing the rule that fixes the rate at the date interest started. And when reminding stops working they have nowhere to go — the invoice here becomes a recovery matter on the same file, already costed, with the debtor already checked.
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.