Compare · Agencies
An agency is paid to rescue a debt. We are paid to stop it becoming one.
By the time most people ring a collection agency, the invoice is six months old and worth roughly half what it was. The agency has not done anything wrong. That is simply when the phone tends to ring.
If a debt is already a year old, or the customer has gone silent entirely, an agency is very probably the right call and we are not. This page is mostly about where that line sits.
The short answer
They are not really alternatives. They are stages. Credit control is what you do from day three so a debt never reaches an agency, and an agency is what you do when it did anyway.
Side by side
Two different jobs, described plainly.
| Dimension | Debt collection agency | Hound |
|---|---|---|
| When work starts | When you refer it, which in practice is after your own chasing has already failed. | Day three past due, automatically, on every invoice on the book. |
| What you pay | A commission on whatever is recovered, taken out of the money you were owed. | £199 a month, plus 8% of a recovery that was more than 45 days overdue, never more than £1,000 on one invoice. |
| If nothing is recovered | You usually pay nothing. The risk genuinely sits with them, and that is the real appeal. | You have still paid the subscription. On a single debt, Debt Rescue is a 60-day trial with nothing charged if we recover nothing. |
| Whose name is on the letter | Theirs. The customer learns they have been passed to a third party. | Yours. The first steps come from your own accounts address and never mention Hound. |
| What happens to the relationship | It generally ends. By the time an agency is involved that is often an accepted cost. | It is built to survive. Any customer can be put on hold with one tap, and that hold beats everything else in the system. |
| Which debts they want | The ones large enough to be worth a commission. Small invoices are rarely worth their time. | Everything overdue on the book at once, above a £250 floor, because the small ones are most of the problem. |
| Statutory interest | Varies by agency, and it is commonly traded away as part of getting a settlement agreed. | Added from the first letter under the 1998 Act, and it belongs to you rather than to us. |
| Court steps | Some agencies are tied to a firm, some are not. Worth asking before you sign. | Not us. Anything reserved goes to a regulated firm, on your instruction, at cost, with no margin taken. |
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
The debt is not sitting still while you decide.
This is the whole argument, and it is not ours. The Commercial Law League of America publishes a chart of how likely a commercial debt is to be recovered as it ages, and the shape of it is brutal.
Nothing about the customer changed between the due date and six months. Their bank balance did not halve. What changed is that the invoice got old, other suppliers got louder, and the person who could have signed it off stopped feeling any urgency about it.
Almost every conversation with an agency happens on the right-hand side of that chart. That is not a criticism of agencies. It is a description of when people call them.
02
Contingency pricing is the reason they cannot start early.
This is the part worth understanding properly, because it is a genuine structural constraint rather than a failing.
If you are paid only when you collect, you cannot afford to spend effort on an invoice that was going to be paid anyway. Most invoices are. So the economics of contingency work push an agency towards debts that have already proved they will not self-clear, which by definition means old ones. Starting on day three would mean doing a great deal of unpaid work on invoices that would have landed in week two without them.
A subscription inverts that. We are paid £199 a month whether an invoice pays itself on day four or has to be dragged out over four months, which means the boring, cheap, early chasing is exactly the work we are set up to do. The 8% only arrives on debts that were more than 45 days overdue, so we are paid extra precisely when we have done the hard part.
03
The letter that ends the relationship.
An agency's envelope carries information beyond its contents. It tells your customer that you have written them off as a customer, and it is usually correct about that.
For a trade, the customer who pays badly is very often the customer who also gives you the most work. A main contractor who is ninety days late on retention may still be the reason you have a crew employed next spring. Ending that relationship to recover one invoice is sometimes right and frequently expensive.
So our first steps come from your own accounts address, signed as your accounts team, and a customer who is slow but decent pays up and never learns Hound exists. The escalation exists, it is on the ladder, and it goes to a regulated firm when somebody has genuinely taken the mick. It is just not the opening move.
04
What you actually keep.
An agency's commission comes out of the principal. You were owed £6,000, they recover £6,000, and you receive less than £6,000.
Statutory interest under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 runs at the Bank of England base rate plus eight per cent on a commercial debt, with fixed compensation on top of every invoice. Almost no trade claims it, because claiming it means writing the letter that says so and then meaning it. We add it from the start, and it is yours.
Our 8% is charged against the recovery, capped at £1,000 on any single invoice, and on most stuck invoices the statutory interest we added is a meaningful part of what came back. Work out what you are owed if you want the figure on your own worst one.
Where we are the wrong answer
When an agency is simply the better buy.
There is a real line here and it is not close to the middle. These are the cases where we would tell you to go to an agency, and where signing up with us would be us taking your money for something we are not the right shape for.
- The debt is already a year old or more. The chart above is against everybody by then, and contingency pricing means the agency carries that risk instead of you.
- The customer has vanished, dissolved, or moved abroad. Tracing and cross-border enforcement are their trade and they are not ours.
- You have exactly one bad debt, no others coming, and no intention of ever changing how you chase. A monthly service is the wrong shape for a one-off rescue, although Debt Rescue exists for precisely that case.
- The sum is large enough that you would genuinely rather pay a percentage and transfer the risk than pay a fixed monthly fee.
- The debt sits outside England and Wales. Our statutory machinery and our escalation route both stop at that border.
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 pick one.
Is Hound a debt collection agency?
No. We are credit control, which is the work that happens before a debt is bad: chasing on a fixed rhythm in your name, adding the statutory interest the law already gives you, and assembling the evidence as we go. We never hold or collect your customers' money, and we never ask a debtor to pay us. They pay you, into your account, exactly as they do now.
Can I use both?
Yes, and for an established ledger that is often the sensible answer. Put the current book on credit control so nothing new goes cold, and send the genuinely dead debts to an agency, where their pricing model suits the risk far better than ours does. We would rather you did that than pretend we are the right tool for a two-year-old debt.
What is a typical debt collection commission in the UK?
It varies with the age and size of the debt, and most agencies quote rather than publish. As a rule the older and smaller the debt, the higher the percentage, because their cost of working it barely changes while the odds get worse. Always ask what happens if they recover part of the sum, and whether the commission is charged on the interest as well as the principal.
Do you take a commission on what you recover?
We take 8% of a recovery, but only where the invoice was more than 45 days overdue on the day it was paid, and never more than £1,000 on a single invoice. A debt that clears inside six weeks costs you nothing beyond the subscription, because it was probably going to clear anyway and billing you for it would be the kind of thing that loses a client who would otherwise have stayed for years.
Will chasing early upset customers I want to keep?
It is the risk we design around rather than the risk we dismiss. The early steps are polite, they come from your own accounts address, and they read like a well-run business rather than a threat. You can put any customer on hold at any point and nothing further goes to them. Anything genuinely disputed leaves the sequence immediately and a human picks it up, because chasing a disputed invoice as though it were clean is how good relationships get burned.
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.