The Slow Drift That Turns Into an Avalanche

It never starts dramatically. That is the problem.

It starts with a client who used to pay on 30 days. Then it was 45. Then 60. Each time, a reasonable explanation. Each time, you accepted it. Because you knew the client. Because the relationship was good. Because it just seemed to ease through without anyone really noticing.

And then one day you looked at the aged debt report and they were sitting at 90 days. And you realised it had been creeping in the wrong direction for months.

Nobody spotted it. Because nobody had a system to spot it.

I have sat opposite more company directors than I can remember who have ended up on the brink of insolvency because of bad debt. And in almost every single case, the root cause was the same thing. Not bad luck. Not a rogue client. Just no system watching the numbers while they were busy running the business.

Here is what breaks my heart about it. By the time they are sitting in front of me, they are not just worried about the business. They are thinking about the conversation they have to have when they get home. How they are going to tell their partner the holiday is cancelled. What they say to their son or daughter about the promise they made and can no longer keep. The mental weight of that is enormous. And it was so unnecessary.

A simple system would have caught this weeks or months earlier. When there was still time to act. When the options were still open. When the problem was still a problem and not yet a crisis.

The tools exist right now to monitor every client’s payment behaviour and their full credit position automatically. They are not expensive. But they only work if someone is actually watching them. Ask whoever runs your credit control whether your system flags changes in payment behaviour over time.

If they look blank, that is your answer.