First, establish one thing: was the invoice ever disputed?
Between businesses, Belgian law presumes that an invoice which is not protested within a reasonable time has been accepted. That presumption is the foundation of the fast route described below, and it is why the very first thing we ask is not how old the debt is, but whether anything ever came back on it — an e-mail saying the goods were wrong, a phone call about the quantity, a line in a letter. Anything at all.
Silence is good news. If your customer never objected, an administrative procedure can produce an enforceable title without a judge ever seeing the file. If they did object, even badly, even late, that route closes and the claim has to go to court. Both are perfectly workable. They are simply not the same procedure, and knowing which one applies before you start saves weeks.
What to do before you hand the file over
- Collect the correspondence, not just the invoice. The order, the delivery note, the e-mail thread. What decides a disputed case is almost never the invoice itself.
- Check what your own terms and conditions say about payment terms, interest and the compensation clause — and whether your customer ever received them. Terms you never communicated do not bind anyone.
- Do not keep sending reminders. After the second one they stop having any effect and start signalling that nothing will follow.
- Note the dates. Invoice date, due date, the date of any partial payment. A partial payment is often an acknowledgement of the debt, which works in your favour.
Why the creditor's own country is the wrong place to start
A collection letter from abroad, in a language the debtor does not use with their accountant, tends to be filed rather than paid. What moves a Belgian company is a letter from a Belgian lawyer, in Dutch or French, that names the procedure that comes next and the court that would hear it. The claim is against a company established in Belgium; the enforcement, if it comes to that, happens in Belgium, through Belgian bailiffs, under Belgian rules.
What we do
You upload the unpaid invoices and, if you have them, your terms and conditions. We read the details automatically, you check them, and the file is opened the same day. From there we send the formal notice, follow up, and — if the claim is undisputed and stays that way — take the administrative route to an enforceable title. If the debtor does dispute, the file does not stop: it moves to a judicial procedure, handled by the same lawyers, without you having to find a second firm.
We work in English, Dutch, French and German, and we only take B2B claims against debtors established in Belgium. That is a narrow service on purpose: it is the one we can do faster and better than a general collection agency.
If you are not sure the debtor can still pay
There is no point winning a claim against an empty company. Before you commit to a procedure, a solvency screening of the debtor tells you what the annual accounts, the company register and the registered charges say about whether there is anything left to recover. It is a separate service, deliberately priced to be cheaper than finding out the hard way.