Compare · Employing somebody
The salary is the small half of what a credit controller costs.
Hiring somebody to chase is the answer that actually works, and it is the answer almost no small trade can justify. The interesting question is not whether a good credit controller is worth it. It is what the job costs when there is only two hours a week of it to do.
Past a certain size, employing somebody genuinely is the right call, and we would be poor value against a competent full-timer with a proper ledger to run. The line is further up than most people think, but it is real and it is described below.
The short answer
A credit controller is excellent value at forty hours a week and terrible value at two. Most trades have about two hours a week of the work and no sensible way to buy it.
Side by side
The same job, bought two ways.
| Dimension | Employing somebody | Hound |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay | Salary, plus employer's National Insurance, plus pension, plus holiday, plus the desk and the software. | £199 a month, or £1,990 a year annually, plus 8% of a qualifying recovery capped at £1,000 an invoice. |
| Minimum sensible purchase | A day a week is about the smallest arrangement most people can actually recruit for. | One month. Or a single invoice, on the Debt Rescue trial. |
| What happens when they are off | Nothing gets chased that week, and the invoices carry on ageing. | The ladder runs on a schedule that does not have holidays. |
| Consistency | Depends entirely on the person, and on whether chasing is the bit of the role they enjoy. | The same rungs on the same days for every debtor, whether or not anybody feels like it. |
| Statutory interest | Only if they know the 1998 Act and are willing to invoice for it. Most are not. | Calculated and added per invoice automatically, and it is yours to keep. |
| Escalation | They hand it to you, and you decide whether to find a solicitor. | A documented pack goes to a regulated firm, at cost, on your instruction. |
| Management | Yours. Recruitment, training, cover, appraisal and the awkward conversation if it is not working. | None. You read one message on a Friday. |
No ticks and crosses, because these are two different jobs rather than the same job done well and badly. Figures checked 6 August 2026.
01
Add up what employing anybody actually costs.
Salary is the number people compare, and it is the wrong number. On top of it sit employer's National Insurance, the workplace pension contribution, paid holiday, and the software and desk they need to do the job. As a rough rule the real cost of an employee runs meaningfully above the headline salary before anybody has chased a single invoice.
Then there is the part that never appears on a spreadsheet. Somebody has to recruit them, train them on your customers, cover them when they are away, and have the conversation if it is not working out. For a business with a handful of staff, that management load falls on the person who was already too busy to do the chasing.
02
The job is real, but it is not a job-sized amount of work.
A trade with sixty live customers does not have forty hours a week of credit control. It has perhaps two: a look at the aged debtor report, a handful of emails, one uncomfortable phone call, and the ongoing decision about who to push and who to leave alone.
Two hours a week is the worst possible amount of work to buy. It is too much to keep absorbing yourself on a Sunday evening and far too little to hire for. A part-time bookkeeper will do it if you ask, but chasing is rarely what they are good at or what they want to be doing, and it is the first thing dropped when the month-end is tight.
That gap is the entire reason this business exists. Not because credit control is hard, but because the smallest amount of it you can employ is far more than most trades need.
03
What you are actually buying instead.
£199 a month buys the whole overdue book chased, not a fixed number of hours. Sixty overdue invoices and six get the same treatment, because the work is a ladder running on a schedule rather than somebody's afternoon.
It also buys the thing a new employee cannot give you for months, which is consistency from the first week. There is no ramp-up, no learning your customers, and no gap while you recruit.
And it buys the statutory interest. A competent credit controller could add it, if they knew the 1998 Act and were willing to put it on the invoice. In practice almost nobody does, which means most employed chasing recovers the principal and leaves the interest on the table every single time. See what that is worth on your book.
Where we are the wrong answer
When you should hire somebody instead.
There is a size above which employing is obviously right, and pretending otherwise would be a short-term sale. If any of this is you, recruit.
- You have enough ledger to keep somebody busy for most of a week. At that point a good credit controller pays for themselves several times over and does far more than chase.
- Your credit control is entangled with the rest of your finance function: credit limits, account opening, allocations, month-end. That is a finance job and it wants a person, not a service.
- The relationships genuinely require judgement on every call, because your customers are few, large, and each one is a negotiation. A ladder is the wrong instrument for that.
- You want somebody in the building who can pick up the phone about anything, not just overdue invoices.
- You already have a bookkeeper who is good at it and enjoys it. Do not take that off them to buy a service.
We would rather you read that and go elsewhere than sign up and work it out in a month. If one of those lines is you, the honest answer is that we are not the thing to buy.
Straight answers
What people ask before they hire.
Is this cheaper than employing somebody part-time?
Almost always, at the small end. £199 a month is well under what a day a week costs once National Insurance, pension and holiday are counted, and it covers the whole overdue book rather than whatever fits into the hours. Where it stops being true is when there is genuinely enough work to fill most of a week, and at that point you should hire.
Can I use this alongside my bookkeeper?
Yes, and it is the most common shape. Your bookkeeper carries on running the ledger and we take the chasing off them, which is usually the part they least want and most often postpone. They keep full visibility, because everything we send is on the record against the invoice.
What if I only want one invoice chased?
That is Debt Rescue: £249 for a single stuck invoice, run as a 60-day trial with nothing charged up front. If we have recovered nothing by day 60 we cancel it ourselves and you are charged nothing at all. It is a cheaper way to test the idea than hiring anybody.
Do you need access to my accounts?
Read-only access to Xero, QuickBooks, Sage or FreeAgent, so we can see what is overdue. We cannot change your books, raise invoices or move money, and we never hold your customers' payments. They pay you directly, into your account, exactly as they do now.
What do you need from me each week?
About a minute. You read a Friday summary saying what went out, what came back, and anything that needs a decision only you can make. If nothing needs you, nothing asks for you.
Start
Hand us the worst one and see what happens.
Debt Rescue is a 60-day trial on a single stuck invoice. Nothing is charged up front, and if we have recovered nothing by day 60 we cancel it ourselves and you are charged nothing at all. That is the entire cost of finding out whether any of the above is true.