You delivered the work. They disappeared. Now what?

When a client goes silent after you’ve delivered, work the problem in order: first confirm it’s genuine ghosting rather than an unspoken dispute or a lost invoice, then escalate in a fixed sequence - reminder, statutory-interest chaser, letter before action, then a collection agency or court. If they’ve truly vanished, tracing exists for exactly this, and debtors are harder to lose than they hope. Then change your terms so the next client can’t run the same play.

Step one: make sure it’s actually ghosting

Ghosting has boring lookalikes. The invoice went to an inbox nobody reads. Your contact left, and nobody inherited you. Accounts won’t pay anything without a purchase order you were never told about. One phone call to the accounts team - not your usual contact - clears a surprising number of “ghostings”.

The other lookalike matters more: a dispute nobody has voiced. Check your paper trail. Did they accept the deliverables? Sign anything off? Raise any complaint before you asked for money? If problems were raised, you have a dispute - answer it on substance, in writing, and keep every dated message. And if complaints only materialise after your payment demand, that timing is itself evidence; it’s the same pattern as the suddenly-appearing counterclaim, and courts have seen it many times.

True ghosting looks like this: work accepted, no complaint on record, emails not bouncing, the business still visibly trading - just not answering you.

Step two: run the escalation sequence

1. Reminders, plural, to more than one person. Short and factual: invoice number, amount, due date passed. Copy the accounts inbox. Keep every send.

2. The interest chaser. On a qualifying commercial debt, statutory interest of 8% plus the Bank of England base rate accrues daily, plus fixed compensation of £40, £70 or £100 per invoice. The free late-payment calculator does the sums and generates the letter. A growing number concentrates minds in a way a static one doesn’t.

3. The letter before action. Silence is usually a bet that you won’t escalate; a properly drafted letter before action calls that bet. If your debtor is an individual or sole trader, the Pre-Action Protocol for Debt Claims applies and builds in a 30-day window to reply before you may issue proceedings; against a limited company that Protocol doesn’t apply, though general pre-action conduct rules still do.

4. Agency or court. If the letter changes nothing, hand the debt to a professional or issue a claim - the agency versus small claims court comparison walks through cost, effort and risk on each side. Disputed or defended debts belong with an agency that runs litigation as well as collection.

Step three: if they’ve genuinely vanished

Disappearing is not a legal defence. The debt survives every office move and abandoned inbox, and the limitation clock - six years in England and Wales, five in Scotland - is generous enough to outlast most vanishing acts.

For a limited company, Companies House is free and takes minutes: confirm the registered office (where the company can be served regardless of where it actually works from), check it’s still active, and look for strike-off notices or insolvency filings. A company in formal insolvency changes your route entirely - you’d claim in the insolvency rather than chase the company, so take advice before spending anything more.

For sole traders and individuals, tracing is a professional discipline: locating debtors through credit and public data is routine work, and many collection agencies include a trace as part of taking the case on. “Gone away” is where a specialist unpaid-invoice agency earns its fee.

Step four: make yourself hard to ghost

The clients who vanish exploit the same gaps every time, so close them: a deposit before work starts; staged payments tied to deliverables, with the contractual right to pause work when a stage isn’t paid; written terms that state due dates and late-payment interest; and a basic credit check on any new client taking meaningful exposure - knowing whether you’re dealing with a limited company or an individual matters later. None of it costs goodwill. It just means the next silence is short and expensive for the right party.

When you reach the handover stage, compare vetted debt recovery agencies on Collect Compare - blind, so you choose on fees, specialism and tracing capability rather than marketing - or let us match you to the best fit. It’s free for creditors: the agency you choose pays for the introduction, and no agency can pay to rank.

This is general information, not legal advice. If the debt is disputed, or the debtor has entered insolvency, take advice before your next step.