Amicable B2B debt recovery: what to do when an invoice is overdue

Start with the facts, not a harsher tone

Check the invoice number, amount, due date and recorded payments before starting. Establish the current balance: requesting the full invoice value after a partial payment creates confusion. Prepare the customer’s details, email, telephone number and the payment account.

What does the email and SMS workflow look like?

Saldora’s standard schedule starts with an email on day +1 after the due date, an SMS on +4 and another email on +7. Formal reminders follow on +14, +18 and +21. The final notice on +30 requires approval. These dates describe the invoice-based schedule, not a promise to recover payment within 30 days.

Email and SMS availability is confirmed before the service starts. The workflow respects contact limits and blocks. It is not a way to contact someone continuously from every available number.

What changes when the customer responds?

A report of payment, a complaint or incorrect details needs review. Contact history shows what was sent and on what basis. Once you record full payment in the panel, the remaining workflow stops. Silence is not treated as an admission of debt.

How does commission-free pricing work?

Saldora charges a fixed amicable recovery price based on the debt band. The PDF payment demand is included. Preparing the e-court claim (which you file yourself) is a separate stage, and court fees are not part of the service price. Current amounts are shown below, without a percentage of recovered payments.

What you can add to an overdue invoice

Late payment in a commercial transaction gives the creditor two separate entitlements. The first is statutory late-payment interest for commercial transactions, running from the day after the due date until payment. The rate is the NBP reference rate plus 10 percentage points; it changes on 1 January and 1 July, so a delay longer than six months is settled across several periods at different rates.

The second is the flat compensation for recovery costs under article 10(1) of the Polish Act of 8 March 2013 on counteracting excessive delays in commercial transactions. It is EUR 40 for debts up to PLN 5,000, EUR 70 above PLN 5,000 and below PLN 50,000, and EUR 100 from PLN 50,000. It is due for the delay alone — without proving what recovery actually cost — and independently of interest. The euro amount is converted at the NBP mid-rate from the last working day of the month preceding the month in which payment became due.

You can calculate the current rate and both amounts for your own invoice in the interest calculator. We deliberately do not print a figure here: the rate changes every six months, and a stale number in an article is worse than none.

What we will not do, even though it is done

We do not rotate sender numbers so the debtor cannot block contact. In decision III KK 266/20 of 2 December 2020 the Polish Supreme Court held that pursuing your own legitimate claim does not exclude liability for persistent harassment if the means used amount to harassment. The argument that you were entitled to call because the debt is yours is not a defence. The competition authority has fined large players for exactly this pattern, and since 2023 manipulating sender address information is actively detected by telecom operators.

If a debtor blocks a channel, we close that channel entirely — across every provider — and flag the case for review. We use several SMS providers for reliability, not to work around a block. A debtor who consistently does not respond is precisely the one worth suing, not the one worth a twentieth SMS.

Nor do we promise results. Market effectiveness for amicable recovery sits between 34 % and 42 %; claims around 90 % come from providers' own materials. We describe what we do, not what the debtor will do.

When to move from amicable recovery to court

The amicable workflow has a natural end: the deadline in the pre-litigation payment demand passing without payment. From that point further reminders add nothing, and the case loses value as time passes. Claims between businesses generally become time-barred after three years, and the older a debt is, the harder it becomes to reconstruct the documents and the greater the risk that the debtor leaves the market.

Moving to the e-court is not automatic, and should not be. It requires your decision, a complete set of documents and the defendant's address — without a full address the claim will not go through. That is why it pays to complete the customer's details when you open the case, not when you file.

The court fee in the electronic writ-of-payment procedure is the creditor's cost, subsequently awarded against the debtor — it is not part of our price. Its size depends on the amount in dispute: fixed fees up to a threshold, then a percentage of the amount with an upper cap. We publish the current bands and amounts in the e-court guide rather than here, so that one place has to be corrected when the official table changes. Interest claimed alongside the principal is excluded from the amount in dispute; the flat compensation is included.