The first creditor to know gets paid. The last one writes it off.

CCJs, winding-up petitions, director changes and late filings rarely arrive without warning. The question is whether you see them in time to act.

Two builders’ merchants supply the same contractor on the same 60-day terms. Same invoices, same exposure. When the contractor goes under, one merchant has been paid down to almost nothing; the other writes off a full quarter’s deliveries. Nothing about the customer was different between them. The only difference was timing — when each merchant found out the contractor was in trouble.

That is the uncomfortable part of most credit losses. The event that sinks you — the administration, the stopped payment, the withdrawn insurance cover — is almost never the first sign. By the time it is visible to everyone, the businesses that were paying attention have already moved: tightened terms, asked for payment up front, reduced the limit, paused supply. The ones still relying on the check they ran at onboarding are the ones left holding the debt.

Insolvencies don’t happen overnight

Companies rarely fail in a straight line from healthy to gone. There is usually a deterioration that plays out over months, leaving a trail in public records well before it reaches the headlines. Four signals tend to move first:

• A county court judgment for an unpaid debt.
• A winding-up petition from a creditor who has run out of patience.
• A director resigning or a sudden change in the board.
• Accounts filed late, or filed in a way that doesn’t reconcile with what you’d expect.

None of these guarantees failure. Plenty of companies take a CCJ and trade on for years. But each one raises the probability that something is wrong, and each one is a reason to look harder at an account you may have waved through twelve months ago. The signals don’t tell you to stop lending. They tell you to pay attention — and crucially, they appear while your exposure to that customer is still live and still growing.

The trail is not rare

This is not a thin signal. In England and Wales, 167,642 new commercial county court judgments were registered in 2025 — up 1.4% on 2024 and close to the highest level in years, even as quarterly volumes eased late in the year. That is a large and growing pool of recorded non-payment sitting in public data. Winding-up petitions add another layer: HMRC alone now accounts for roughly 60% of petitions as it works through a tax-debt balance that reached around £43.8 billion by September 2025. Behind those numbers are payment habits that are already stretching — trade-credit data across Europe show only a small minority of B2B invoices are paid within 30 days, and a rising share are settled beyond 70 days. The information exists. The question is who is watching it, and when.

The window almost nobody uses

Here is the part most credit teams miss. These signals don’t all arrive at once, and they don’t all reach you at the same moment everyone else sees them. A winding-up petition is filed at court before it is advertised in The Gazette — and the advertisement is what prompts banks to freeze accounts. There is a window between the two. A CCJ is registered before it surfaces in a report someone happens to pull next quarter. A director's resignation is filed on the day it occurs, not on the day you next review the account.

The creditor who closes that window — who learns about the petition or the judgment in days rather than at the next annual review — has options the others don’t. They can ask for payment up front. They can shorten terms. They can keep supplying, but on a tighter leash. The creditor who finds out when the payment stops has only one option left: join the queue.

Exposure builds after the decision, not before it

Most credit processes are built around the decision to take a customer on. That is where the effort goes: the application, the check, the limit, the sign-off. It makes sense — it is the moment of commitment, and it feels decisive. But the decision is the moment your exposure is smallest. From there, it only grows. Every invoice, every renewal, every uplift in the limit adds to what you stand to lose, and the customer you assessed at onboarding is not the customer you have eighteen months later. You did your hardest looking when you had the least at stake, and your softest looking once the money was on the table.

Put a number on it: a merchant that keeps shipping pallets to a contractor through a quiet deterioration can add tens of thousands to the balance in a single quarter — every pound of it extended after the only real check was run. The signal that the contractor was slipping was filed in public records weeks earlier. The exposure grew anyway, because nobody was looking.

The control most teams rely on to catch this — the annual review — is built for a slower world. Reviewing an account once a year assumes a business can only deteriorate about as fast as you reassess it. It can’t. A company can move from healthy to insolvent within a single review cycle, meaning the review arrives to confirm a loss rather than prevent one. An annual review is not a monitoring system. It is a calendar reminder, and calendars don’t know when a customer is in trouble.

You monitor applicants more closely than customers

Here is the insight worth sitting with. Almost every credit team runs a thorough check on a stranger at the door, then never looks that hard again at the accounts actually carrying its money. The scrutiny is front-loaded onto the applicant — the relationship with the least exposure — and tapers to almost nothing on the live customer, where the exposure is largest and still building.

Flip that, and the whole posture changes. Your most important accounts to watch are not the ones applying; they are the ones already inside your book, holding your largest balances, quietly ageing. The applicant has to earn your trust once. The customer has to keep it every week, and you are the only one who can see when they stop.

What to do about it

You don’t need to see more data. The public record is already full of it. What changes outcomes is seeing the important changes sooner — and deciding in advance which changes are worth acting on. A workable approach:

• Decide which signals matter for your book. A CCJ above a set value, a petition, a director change at a key account, a late filing. Not every flag deserves a response; choose the ones that do.
• Watch your live customers, not just your applicants. The accounts carrying the most exposure deserve at least as much attention as a new application.
• Shorten the gap between event and action. The advantage isn’t the alert; it’s acting on it while you still have options.
• Treat a signal as a reason to look, not a verdict. The goal is an earlier, better-informed review — not an automatic stop.

The first creditor to know a customer is in trouble still has choices. The last one to know has a write-off. Same customer, same deterioration, different outcome — decided entirely by who was paying attention. The check tells you who you are dealing with today. Only watching tells you when that changes.

Sources

• Registry Trust — Q4 2025 commercial CCJ summary, England & Wales (167,642 in 2025, +1.4% YoY). registry-trust.org.uk
• HMRC share of winding-up petitions (~60%) and tax-debt balance ~£43.8bn at end-Sep 2025 — insolvency-practitioner and creditor-guidance analysis. companydebt.com
• Allianz Trade — Insolvency / payment-terms data 2026 (B2B payment cycles lengthening). allianz-trade.com
• The Gazette — winding-up petition advertised after filing; basis for the filing-to-advertisement window. thegazette.co.uk
• Insolvency Service — Monthly insolvency statistics (context: May 2026 company insolvencies 1,868, −16% YoY). gov.uk