We are often asked by our clients, When, is the right time, and how long should they wait before taking action against, their client and instructing our debt collection services?
We say to our clients we wouldn’t let invoices go over 90 days from the date of issue without taking action, as the older a debt becomes the harder it is to recover. However, in most businesses every client is different, and it really depends on the payment history that client has had with them in the past, along with how long they have traded with them.
We were contacted by a new client in Mid-December 2017, who was owed a substantial sum of money from Kleeneze Limited, who have only last week gone into Administration, as reported in National Press.
Kleeneze administration
Our clients had dealt with Kleeneze for several years, and they had always paid them within our client’s payment terms, they were also sitting on a lot of stock which had been previously ordered and was specially made for them. As a long-term relationship of trust and payment had developed over the years of trading, our client was very reluctant to instruct us to collect the debt from Kleeneze as they wanted to keep the relationship intact, but they had not been paid or had any response regarding payment for over 60 days. On further investigation, we uncovered that the company had a number of active County Court Judgments registered against it, this coupled with the fact they had not heard or had payment from them for 60 days, they decided to instruct our services.
Serve a statutory demand
Once we had served a Statutory Demand upon the company we began to negotiate with them on repaying the debt. They were looking to repay the debt over 36 months but we managed to get them to repay the debt over 2 months. We made a full recovery including all our costs on behalf of our client.
The business went into Administration on 12th April 2018, around 6 weeks after we had made a full recovery, so our clients were extremely lucky to have taken action when they did.
Contact us today
Think we could help your business? For free initial debt collection advice please call us on 0333 800 8919 or contact us online.