In short
- In France, the opening of insolvency proceedings against a customer (safeguard, court-ordered reorganisation or compulsory liquidation) is published in the BODACC. These notices can be consulted free of charge, and software can read them through an open interface (API).
- A custom-built agent can cross-check these notices with your customer list and your late payments, then hand you a short list of risks every week.
- It will alert, it will not decide: no credit cut-off, no change of terms, nothing sent without your agreement.
Let's take a typical scenario. An SME with 40 employees sells supplies to a few hundred business customers, payable at 30 days. One of them pays a little later each month. Then the team learns, by chance, that this customer has been in court-ordered reorganisation for several weeks. One question becomes urgent: is there still enough time to file the claim for the amount owed?
Here is an example of a custom set-up that could have raised the alarm earlier, using public and free data.
The public signals of a fragile customer
Insolvency proceedings are court proceedings opened when a company has serious difficulty paying its debts: safeguard, court-ordered reorganisation (redressement judiciaire) or compulsory liquidation (liquidation judiciaire).
The BODACC (Bulletin officiel des annonces civiles et commerciales) publishes several families of useful notices:
- insolvency proceedings;
- conciliation proceedings: a conciliator appointed by the court president helps the company reach an amicable agreement with its main creditors; the procedure stays confidential, unless the agreement is approved by the court (validated by a judgment);
- professional recovery proceedings: they allow certain sole traders who can no longer pay and have almost no assets to have their debts wiped out without compulsory liquidation;
- sales and transfers, for example when a customer sells its business;
- amendments, including changes of director;
- deregistrations, when a company is struck off the register.
None of these signals is a verdict. A new director can be good news.
In France, the timetable is precise. According to the official website Entreprendre Service Public, the judgment opening the proceedings must be published in the BODACC within the following 15 days. From that publication, the creditor (you, if the customer owes you money) has 2 months to file its claim. It is filed with the court-appointed creditors' representative in a safeguard or reorganisation, and with the liquidator in a liquidation. The period becomes 4 months if the creditor is not based in mainland France. If you hold a published guarantee (a “sûreté”) or contract, the period runs from the notification sent to you, not from the publication.
A claim that is not filed is not taken into account in the proceedings: it will not be paid. A late creditor can ask for a “relevé de forclusion”, that is, the lifting of the loss of its right, within 6 months of the publication of the opening judgment. To do so, it files an application with the court registry, addressed to the supervising judge. These are general rules: for your own case, speak to your adviser.
Open sources, country by country
France
- The BODACC, published by the DILA (Direction de l'information légale et administrative). Notices published since 2008 can be consulted free of charge on bodacc.fr. A free “Alerte” account sends an email every day, at around 5 a.m., about the notices that match your criteria. A free API (an interface that lets software read the data) distributes the notices under Licence Ouverte 2.0, the licence for reusing public data published by Etalab. In this data, the notice gives the company's SIREN number (its 9-digit identifier).
- The State's API Recherche d'entreprises, open access, limited to 7 calls per second. For a SIREN number, it returns in particular the directors, the company's status with a possible closure date, and whether it is a sole trader. It says nothing about insolvency proceedings. Companies whose data is not publicly disclosable are not listed.
For a few customers, a regular search on bodacc.fr may be enough. The agent becomes useful when the list is long, changes often and has to be read alongside your late payments.
Spain and Belgium: first leads
- Spain. The Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado (the Spanish State Official Gazette agency) publishes an official API. For a given date, it gives the summary of the BORME, the official bulletin of the commercial register. Section A of the BORME (“actes inscrits”, registered acts) contains in particular appointments, terminations of office and the “situación concursal” (insolvency situation). In the example we looked at, companies are identified there by their name and their register references, with no tax number. We have not yet checked the coverage of insolvency proceedings, the reliable way to link a notice to a customer, or the deadline for filing a claim.
- Belgium. The open data of the BCE (Banque-Carrefour des Entreprises) is free, on registration. It contains the registered active entities, and the page does not mention bankruptcies. We have not yet checked the official source for bankruptcies and judicial reorganisations, or whether software can access it.
What the agent will do, every week
- It will read your customer list and their SIREN numbers in your invoicing software, read-only.
- It will search the BODACC for recent notices on those numbers. It will match by number, not by name, to avoid namesakes.
- It will query the API Recherche d'entreprises for each customer: company closed, director different from the previous week.
- It will cross-check with your data: overdue invoices, outstanding balance (what the customer owes you), payment time getting longer.
- It will hand you a short list, ranked by risk: customer, signal, link to the notice, outstanding balance, delay, suggestion to approve.
One case does not wait for the following week: the opening of proceedings against a customer who owes you money. For this case, the agent will be able to check the BODACC every day and warn you the day it finds the notice. Keep in mind that the notice can appear up to 15 days after the judgment. The agent will remind you of the filing deadline. It will prepare a draft file with what the claim must contain according to Entreprendre Service Public: amount due on the day of the opening judgment, sums to be paid and their due dates, documents proving the claim, such as your invoices. If an invoice-chasing agent is also in place at your company, it will pause the reminders to this customer: this is a stop case provided for in its rulebook.
When it is not sure, it will ask you instead of guessing: a customer without a SIREN number, two companies with similar names, a notice it cannot classify. Not all “procédures collectives” notices are openings. They also include, for example, notices of filing of the statement of claims (the list of claims filed with the court registry), closing judgments or conversions to liquidation. The agent will say what it has read and give the link.
What it will not do
The agent will never do these actions on its own:
- block a customer account or suspend deliveries;
- change a payment term or a credit limit, require a deposit;
- write to the customer or to the court-appointed creditors' representative;
- send a claim filing.
In our method, an agent's autonomy is set by levels, from 0 (it suggests, without acting) to 3 (it acts alone, under supervision). These actions stay at level 1: the agent prepares, and a person on your team approves, corrects or rejects each action. The claim filing, a binding document sent to a third party, never goes beyond this level.
The reason is simple: you know your customer, the notice does not. Every alert and every decision will be recorded in a log (what the agent read, what it suggested, who decided, when). Before going live, a “shadow” trial period of a few weeks, with a length set with you, will compare its alerts with what your team spots on its own.
Personal data: sole traders and company directors
The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) protects any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (Article 4). The text names the name among the ways of identifying a person. The name of a sole trader in a notice, or of a director, is therefore personal data.
The Licence Ouverte 2.0 allows the reuse of this data provided the legal framework for personal data protection is respected, and the source and date of last update are cited. The agent's rulebook will therefore set:
- the strict minimum: it will only search for your customers' numbers and keep the date, the type of signal and the link, not the whole bulletin; it will not keep the directors' dates of birth that the API Recherche d'entreprises can return;
- excluded sections: those that concern private individuals, outside professional activity;
- a retention period, written down and applied;
- a processing location chosen with you: your cloud in an EU region, your servers or a dedicated server with us. The AI model can be operated outside the EU, under GDPR safeguards; we will tell you where before going live.
Two points are settled with your data protection officer or your adviser. The legal basis: “legitimate interest” (Article 6) is a possibility, to be confirmed by a written analysis. Informing the people concerned: Article 14 requires stating the source of the data and whether it comes from publicly accessible sources; the wording and the exceptions provided by this article are to be checked with your adviser.
Finally, Article 22 gives the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, where it produces legal effects concerning the person or similarly significantly affects them. Here, a person will decide, not the agent alone.
Indicators: useful alerts, unpaid invoices avoided
During the trial period and then every month, supervision will track:
- the share of alerts judged useful by your team (a “useful” or “not useful” click);
- false alerts (an unrelated notice, a wrong match);
- claims filed within the deadline;
- the outstanding balance at the time of each alert, then how it changes.
“Unpaid invoices avoided” are hard to measure: you never know what would have happened without the alert. We will show facts (alert received, decision taken, outstanding balance on that date), not a savings figure promised in advance.
Going further
- The agents we are preparing, including an invoice-chasing agent.
- Our method: rulebook approved by you, shadow trial period, autonomy levels.
- Supervision: dashboard, alerts, monthly report.
- Data and security: where the agents run and what they read.
- Request an audit: €490 excl. VAT; its price is deducted from the quote if you sign it within 30 days.