For Plumbers and heating engineers · England and Wales
It was an emergency on Saturday. It is not an emergency now.
Nobody rings a plumber when they are relaxed. They ring when there is water coming through a ceiling, they agree to anything, and then the urgency belongs entirely to you.
What we do about it
We chase every overdue invoice in your name, add the interest the law already says you are owed, and escalate through a regulated firm when somebody takes the mick.
Or one debt as a 60-day trial, with nothing charged unless we get it back.
The one that actually stops you
You already know which invoice this is about.
The landlord is the classic. Wanted it done same day, wanted it done properly, and now the invoice sits behind a letting agent who says they are waiting on the owner. Then there is the boiler that was quoted at four grand, half paid up front and the balance now three months overdue, where the customer is not avoiding you so much as hoping you forget.
Where you stand
Most of your debt is owed by people, not companies
Not legal advice
That changes the position more than most trades realise. A private individual is a consumer, and none of the commercial machinery applies to them.
- No statutory interest. The Late Payment of Commercial Debts Act does not reach a homeowner, so there is nothing to add to the bill.
- The Pre-Action Protocol for Debt Claims applies before anybody goes to court, and it has real timescales and real consequences for ignoring it.
- A limited company landlord is a business, and everything commercial is back on the table. Same debt, different rules, entirely because of who signed.
- Letting agents are usually agents, not the debtor. Chasing the wrong party is how a solvable debt becomes a dead one.
We are not solicitors and this is not legal advice. Hound is credit control: we chase, we add the statutory interest and compensation the law already gives you, and we assemble the evidence. Anything that needs a letter before action, a claim or an adjudication goes to a regulated firm, on your instruction, and only after you approve it.
The bit almost nobody claims
A £6,000 invoice at 68 days is really £6,201.34.
Statutory interest runs at 11.75% a year on a commercial debt, plus fixed compensation per invoice, under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998. On that invoice it is £201.34 on top, and it is yours, not ours. Most trades never claim a penny of it, because claiming it means writing the letter that says so and then meaning it.
How we chase for plumbers and heating engineers
Same machine. Not the same letter.
We check who actually owes it before anything goes out, because a landlord operating through a limited company and a landlord operating personally are two different debts. Consumers get every message approved by you first, a maximum of one contact a week, and any reply at all stops the sequence until a person has read it.
Start
Hand us the worst one and see what happens.
Nothing is charged unless we get it back. If we have recovered nothing by day 60 we cancel it ourselves and you are charged nothing at all.