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We are experienced, licensed insolvency experts who provide real support to small and medium-sized businesses in the UK. Open Mon - Fri 9am–5:30pm

Our core focuses are business recovery and turnaround, managing any risks to your company and where necessary, business closures. Experienced company debt advice for sole traders, SMEs and large corporations. Follow us for company debt advice and news!

30/09/2026

A business can be profitable and insolvent on the same day. Most owners don't realise those are two different questions until it's too late to matter.

Profit is what's left after costs, on paper, over a period. Cash is what's actually in the account right now. A company can be winning on the first and losing on the second at the same moment: full order book, healthy margins, and no money for Friday's wages because it's all tied up in stock, or work done, or an invoice nobody's paid.

The law sees this even when directors don't. There are two insolvency tests. Can you pay your debts as they fall due (the cash flow test), and do you owe more than you own (the balance sheet test). A profitable company can fail the first while passing the second comfortably, and it's the first one that actually closes businesses.

That's why "but we're profitable" is one of the most dangerous sentences a director can lean on. Profit is a story about the past. Cash is what keeps the lights on tomorrow.

The number worth watching isn't your margin. It's how many days of cash you'd have if the next big invoice paid late. If you don't know it, work it out before something forces you to.

29/09/2026

There's a Budget in four weeks, and the pre-Budget noise has started. Sell before the CGT change. Take the dividend now. Restructure before the window closes. Most of it is guesswork dressed as urgency.

A cleaner way to think about the next month: separate the things you can genuinely do now from the things you're only guessing at.
Getting your real numbers in front of you, understanding your cash position, knowing what you'd owe if you acted and if you didn't, that's preparation, and it's useful whatever the Chancellor announces. Making a permanent, hard-to-reverse change to your business on a rumour about a policy that may not happen, that's a bet.

The trap isn't the Budget. It's letting a date in someone else's diary rush a decision that deserves its own timeline. A tax rule you dislike is usually survivable. A rushed restructure, a fire sale, a dividend you couldn't really afford, those are the moves people regret.
So get ready. Know your position cold, take proper advice on your situation. Just don't confuse being prepared with being panicked. One is planning. The other is a Chancellor you've never met making your decisions for you.

28/09/2026

If a second tax letter from HMRC lands this autumn, read it carefully before you pay. Some people are about to pay the same bill twice.

Here's what's happening. HMRC sent Simple Assessment letters earlier this year, but they left out the tax due on savings interest. The banks report that separately, so a second letter is going out between October and December to add it in.

The catch: that second letter shows your total tax for the year, not just the new part. Pay the first one, then pay the full figure on the second, and you've overpaid. Getting money back from HMRC is far slower than sending it.

So if a second letter arrives: check what you've already paid, subtract it, pay only the difference. That's HMRC's own advice, buried in the small print.

And this net is widening. The number of people taxed on savings interest has gone from 1.2 million a few years ago to an estimated 4.5 million now, as frozen thresholds pull ordinary savers in. If you've never had one of these letters, this may be the year you do.

Source: HMRC / Simple Assessment, 2026.

25/09/2026

If late payment has hit your business, the odds are someone owes you around £17,000 right now.

That's the average per affected business, from the government's own research. Money you've earned, work you've delivered, sitting in someone else's account instead of yours.

Here's what makes it quietly infuriating. It usually isn't a bad debt. The customer isn't disputing it or going under. They can pay. They've just worked out that your invoice is a cheaper source of working capital than their own overdraft, and that chasing it costs you time and awkwardness and them nothing.

The average affected business loses 86 hours a year to chasing. Two working weeks spent asking to be paid for work already done.
None of this is your failing. But the one lever you control is how fast and how firmly you chase. Terms agreed in writing before the job. Invoice out the day it's finished. A polite chase on day one late, not day thirty. It feels pushy. The £17,000 is what politeness costs.

Source: Small Business Commissioner / DBT, 2025.

23/09/2026

There's a name for a business that earns just enough to cover the interest on its debt, but never enough to pay the debt down, invest, or grow. A zombie.

It's a strangely comfortable place to be, which is what makes it dangerous. Wages get paid, suppliers get paid, the bank gets its interest. From the outside, and often from the inside, it looks like survival. Nobody's chasing you, so nothing feels urgent.

But a zombie isn't stable, it's just still. It has no cushion, so it can't absorb a shock. One lost customer, one rate rise, one bad quarter, and what looked like survival turns out to have been a slow decline that just hadn't hit the wall yet.

The Bank of England held rates at 3.75% last week, and three of its members wanted them higher. The cheap money that let a lot of these businesses tick over isn't coming back.

So the honest question is: is my business recovering, or just servicing? If every good month goes straight to interest with nothing left to build on, that's not a plateau. It's a warning, and a much better one to hear now than after the shock lands.

22/09/2026

There's a Budget on 28 October. If your business is under real pressure, the most tempting thing to do is wait for it. That's usually the wrong call.

Waiting for a Budget feels like doing something. It isn't. It's deferring a decision and hoping an outside event makes it for you. Meanwhile the things actually squeezing you, the overdue invoice, the VAT bill, the shrinking cash buffer, carry on regardless of what a Chancellor says in five weeks.

A Budget might change your tax bill next year. It won't pay this month's wages, and it won't reopen the options that quietly close while you wait.

The Budget is a date in someone else's diary. Your cash position is the one that's actually counting down. If the business is struggling, the move is to look at the numbers honestly now, and get advice while you still have choices.

21/09/2026

Fewer businesses are failing right now. Fewer are being started, too.
New company registrations fell 6% last quarter, and start-up activity dropped in every single UK region. Insolvencies fell by the same 6%.

The failure number gets the headlines. This one matters more. A country where fewer people are willing to risk starting something is a quieter problem than a wave of collapses, and a slower one to reverse.

Businesses closing is a cycle. People deciding it isn't worth starting is a mood. The second takes far longer to come back.
Source: R3 Business Health Report, Q2 2026.

18/09/2026

Company administrations were up 60% on last year in August. You'll see that number a lot this week. It's real, it's misleading, and the Insolvency Service says so itself.

Buried in its own commentary: the rise is "driven by over 250 connected companies in the Real Estate sector entering administration." One property group, collapsing in stages since March, is doing most of the work in that 60%.

Take that group out and administrations aren't surging, they're roughly where they were. Total company insolvencies in August were actually down 3% on last year.

This matters because the monthly figure is about to be quoted as proof of a worsening crisis, and it doesn't show that. It shows one large, unusual failure distorting a series that's otherwise flat to easing.

If you run a business, the useful read isn't the scary headline. It's the boring truth underneath it: insolvencies are steady, not spiking, and one dramatic number is usually one dramatic story, not a trend.

Source: Insolvency Service, August 2026 commentary.

17/09/2026

Claire's is reopening about 50 shops in the UK this year. You may have read that the brand was "rescued."

Here's what that word quietly hides.

The Claire's brand was bought. The company that ran it wasn't. It went into administration, failed, was rescued once, and failed again. Around 1,300 people lost their jobs and its remaining UK stores closed this spring. What survived is the name over the door, now owned by someone new.

This is the bit that trips people up about administration. "Saved," "rescued," "bought out" almost always mean the brand and the good assets were bought. The legal company that owed the money is gone. Shareholders get nothing, creditors get pennies, and staff usually get redundancy, not a rescue.

For a director, the lesson isn't about Claire's. It's that administration is a tool for salvaging value from a failing company, not for saving the company itself. If you're hoping it keeps the thing you built intact, it's worth understanding early exactly what it does and doesn't protect.

Source: reported administration of Claire's UK, 2025 to 2026.

14/09/2026

Dissolving a company to escape its debts and quietly starting the same business again has always been risky. It just got riskier.

Live investigations into abusive phoenix companies are up 39% in a year, to 185. There's now £25 million behind the crackdown, and 1,153 directors were banned for financial misconduct last year.

The line matters here, because it isn't where people think. Buying the assets of a failed business and starting again is legal, done properly and at a fair price. What's being hunted is the other version: dissolving a company to walk away from what it owes, then carrying on with the same customers, the same assets, and the debts left behind for someone else.

That continuity is exactly the tell. Same business, same director, new shell, creditors wiped. If that's the plan, it isn't a clever restructure. It's the thing the £25 million was set aside to catch.
If a company genuinely can't continue, there's a proper way to close it, and often a legitimate way to begin again. That route is worth the advice. The shortcut isn't worth the risk.

Source: Insolvency Service, gov.uk, 2026.

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