Hundreds of winding-up petitions are advertised each month, offering credit controllers an early warning of customer insolvency risk. Discover how to use the Gazette, Companies House checks and director disqualification rules to protect your business, recover overdue debts and improve enforcement outcomes.
Picture a packaging distributor with a few hundred trade customers and a credit controller who has been in the job for years. The business is invented, but the week is not. On Monday, a long-standing customer asks whether 30-day terms could become 45 for this quarter only. On Wednesday, a second customer pays three-quarters of an invoice and says the rest will follow. By Friday a third has stopped answering the phone and replies only by email. None of these requests is dramatic. Taken one at a time, each is easy to say yes to. Taken together, the distributor has agreed to lend money to three businesses that never completed a loan application.
A customer who reliably orders but consistently pays late isn’t simply a good customer with one small quirk. They may be using your business as working capital, whether that’s intentional or not.
Revenue without timely cash isn’t the same thing as a healthy customer relationship. It’s turnover that costs you money to fund, every single cycle.
Three directors were prosecuted this month for ignoring one of the most significant reforms to hit the UK company register in a generation. Between the three of them, the total financial penalty came to £553 in fines, plus costs and a victim surcharge. One individual was fined £80.
That is the entire story in one sentence, and it is worth sitting with before getting to what the reform is actually meant to achieve, because the gap between the ambition and the enforcement is exactly the gap that businesses extending trade credit need to understand.
One chance, offered clearly and with conditions, is entirely reasonable. What often happens instead is chance after chance, each one extending the debtor’s runway at the creditor’s expense, with no criteria for when “another chance” stops being offered.
Genuine, temporary circumstances are usually explained specifically, with a concrete plan attached, not just a vague request for a bit more patience.
Without any conditions attached, “another chance” becomes the default answer every time, and a default with no limit isn’t really a decision anymore. It’s a habit.
The point of offering a chance is to see whether the situation improves. If each chance simply leads to a request for another one, that’s information, not bad luck.
Personal and business relationships blur naturally when you already know someone socially, or have known them for years before you ever traded together.
Treating a friend differently in business doesn’t protect the friendship. It delays an uncomfortable conversation, and the delay usually makes that conversation harder, not easier, when it finally happens.
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.
