Dealing with a debtor who ignores your communications can be frustrating and financially stressful. Whether it’s an individual or a business, retrieving the money owed to you is essential.
Here’s a comprehensive guide on what steps you can take, and how a private investigator could help.
Verify the contact details
The first thing you should be doing, whenever you struggle to get in touch with a business client (debtor or not) is to verify the contact details you’re using.
They might’ve changed email address, which may sound rare but if they’re struggling to pay you then there’s a chance they’re changing business name or just refreshing things to try and give things a kickstart.
Spend some time researching their business online, looking up contacts on LinkedIn, to make sure you have the most up-to-date information.
Also, this may seem patronising, but just check you’ve not made a mistake when typing an email address in your email client. If you make a typo once, it might’ve been stored and so you wouldn’t notice when you keep then sending emails to them.
It’s unlikely – especially since sending to an invalid email would mean you get a bounceback – but it’s worth checking, just to be sure.
Send a formal reminder
Once you know you have the right details, send a formal reminder. Make sure this stands out from your regular invoices or chaser emails – use a formal letter structure that sets out the money owed, how long it has been owed, and the potential next steps that you might use (debt collection agencies or legal action).
If you can send this as an actual letter, ideally with recorded delivery, even better. But if you need to send it as an email, attach the letter to the email so that they have a copy. Give it an attention-grabbing subject line, don’t respond to an existing chain. Something like “Notice of arrears and potential action” should suffice.
Offer a payment plan
Still no reply? Then it’s a good idea to offer up an olive branch in the form of a payment plan.
This isn’t ideal, but getting your money in instalments is better than never getting it at all. And by offering a payment plan, you show your debtor that you’re willing to work with them.
However, you should set the terms. Establish what you’ll accept and over how long. This may entice them to reply either to agree or to counter-offer.
Explore legal options
Once you know that a payment plan is being ignored, you should check out your legal options. Small claims court will be much easier for smaller debts, but for large debts you may need to consider something bigger.
Either way, once you’ve established which court route you need to go down, it’s time to bring in the big guns (a PI) to communicate this to your debtor – to give them one more chance to pay before you initiate legal proceedings or to help deliver the court papers to them.
If you get to step 4 of this process with no luck, give us a call on 01772 334700 and we’ll talk you through the services we can provide to put you in touch with an evasive debtor.
We’ve plenty of experience and we also know that you don’t want to spend huge sums to chase money owed, so we can explore a range of options with you to suit your budget and the size of the debt.