Athena Collections

Pull up your aged debtor report and look at the column headed “days overdue”. Now ask yourself an awkward question. If nearly every account on that list is somewhere between 15 and 30 days past your stated terms, is the report telling you which customers are behaving badly, or is it telling you that your terms were never the real terms in the first place?

Scale feels like safety. A large, well-known company seems inherently more stable than a small one, simply by virtue of its size and visibility.

Carillion. Wilko. Thomas Cook. Debenhams. Britishvolt. Every one of these was a large, established, well-known business right up until it wasn’t.

421,800 pounds. That is what the average organisation surveyed by Marsh now spends each year collecting money it has already earned, invoiced and legally become entitled to.

Sit with that for a moment. Not the cost of winning business. Not the cost of delivering it. The cost of persuading customers to hand over money that was never in dispute.

Don’t worry, they’ll pay at month end. That’s just how they operate”.

A genuine month-end payment run is a process.

A repeated promise of “month end” with no month actually delivering payment is an excuse wearing the clothes of a process.

“I don’t want to upset them”.

Are you avoiding this conversation because the customer is genuinely likely to be upset, or because you’re uncomfortable having it?

Picture a credit controller running the standard checks on a new customer this week: a credit score, a search for county court judgments, a quick look at whether the company has been through insolvency before. All sensible. All also incomplete, because none of them would have caught the two stories that actually broke in the past fortnight, and neither would most businesses’ current process.

Media portrayals and old industry reputations have shaped a lasting image of debt collection as intimidating, involving threats and pressure tactics.

Some agencies genuinely have operated this way, and a handful of high profile cases have reinforced the stereotype for the whole industry.

Business owners understandably don’t want their name, or their customer relationship, associated with that kind of behaviour.

Nobody wants to imagine a phone call being made in their company’s name that they wouldn’t be comfortable making themselves.

The Foreign Judgments (Reciprocal Enforcement) Act 1933 covers a shortlist of countries that has barely grown in decades. The United States isn’t on it. Nor is Hong Kong, Japan, or most of the countries UK businesses actually trade with outside Europe. Until 27 July 2026, that meant any UK business holding a court judgment from one of those places was in a genuine grey area about whether it could actually be used here against a debtor with assets in England. That grey area has just narrowed considerably, and it is one of three developments from the past fortnight that UK Finance Directors, Credit Managers and business owners should be paying attention to.

Busy is rarely the actual reason a payment doesn’t happen on time. Businesses find time for the things they’ve decided matter: wages get paid, rent gets paid, HMRC gets paid, and the suppliers who’ve made the most noise get paid.

Busy is rarely the actual reason a payment doesn’t happen on time. Businesses find time for the things they’ve decided matter: wages get paid, rent gets paid, HMRC gets paid, and the suppliers who’ve made the most noise get paid.