Collecting accounts receivables from the customer - we know a lot about this!

As part of the analysis of the legislative instruments in Russia, the following ways of ensuring performance of obligations can be singled out: penalty, deposit, insurance, suretyship, retention, a letter of credit, an independent (bank) guarantee. The optimal strategy for preventing accounts receivables must be chosen in accordance with the terms of the contract. However, it is worth remembering that the listed interim measures do not guarantee a 100% recovery of the receivables.

As a rule, each case is individual and must be analyzed from several sides: the availability of the necessary documents and their correctness, the debtor’s solvency, the court in which the dispute will be considered, etc. It takes an average of 3 months (in case of simplified procedure) to 11 months (in case the defendant appeals against the court decision) from the moment a claim is sent to the court until the moment the money is received on the bank settlement account. If the debtor does not have funds in the current account, the process of receiving the debt may take up to 2-3 years (in case of bankruptcy of the debtor).

It is possible to apply art. 395 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, which provides for liability for failure to fulfill a monetary obligation if a different amount of interest is not established by law or by contract. The same article of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation also stipulates the procedure for calculating interest for obligation default.

The APC of the Russian Federation provides that civil disputes on the recovery of funds may be referred to the court’s resolution after taking measures for pretrial settlement after 30 days from the date of the claim, unless law or contract establishes other periods of time and procedures.

In this case, if the pre-trial settlement of the dispute is not observed, the filed claim will be returned in accordance with Art. 129 APC RF.

Most often, firms sell goods and services, but no one forbids them to sell their debts (receivables). There are several ways to execute this operation: factoring, when an organization / bank acquires debtor’s money requirements and collects debt on their own; the contract of receivables assignment (cession), in other words, the lender and the buyer of the debt sign an agreement on the assignment of debt.