Recovering an unpaid B2B invoice in Argentina usually runs through three stages: a formal demand, a mandatory mediation step in most provinces, and – only if the debtor still refuses to pay – a court claim built on the invoice itself. Which stage moves fastest depends on how well the debt was documented at the outset.
This sequence works cleanly when the debtor is an Argentine company still operating, the invoice is tied to goods or services actually delivered, and there is some paper trail behind it: a purchase order, a delivery note, an accepted invoice, or correspondence that does not deny the debt. It also assumes the debtor has something worth seizing later – a bank account, receivables, registered assets, or stock – because a judgment against an empty shell recovers nothing, however clean the paperwork was.
It applies less cleanly when the debtor disputes the underlying obligation itself, for example a quality complaint or a claim that the goods were never accepted at all. In that case the file still opens the same way, but it is more likely to end up in a full evidentiary claim rather than the faster route described further down. The route also stops applying, in the sense that matters to a creditor, once the debtor has entered a formal insolvency proceeding: individual collection gives way to a filing inside that process, and the practical questions change from "how do I get paid" to "how do I rank" – see What happens if an Argentine debtor files for bankruptcy?
Before committing to the sequence at all, it is worth a quick check on proportionality: an invoice that is small relative to the cost of running a cross-border file through mediation and then a court filing is a different decision from a large one with a solvent, still-trading debtor on the other side. That triage belongs at the start, not after the first invoice for legal work has already arrived.
Each stage below assumes the one before it produced no payment.
The friction point most creditors underestimate is the second stage. Mediation is procedural, not optional, in the jurisdictions where it applies, and skipping the assessment of how it is likely to go – settlement, stalling, or silence – tends to produce a file that reaches court later and more expensively than it needed to.
Three things move this file more than anything else in the paperwork. Whether the invoice supports the faster executive route or forces an ordinary claim changes the shape of the entire case, because the ordinary route argues facts that the executive route simply does not reopen. Whether mediation settles the matter or becomes a formality before litigation changes how much time passes before anything is actually filed – the underlying step here, mandatory prior mediation, is procedural rather than optional in most jurisdictions, so it cannot be skipped to save time even where both sides already know it will fail. And whether the debtor has assets that are actually locatable in Argentina determines whether a favourable judgment is worth anything at all once it is issued.
A creditor already holding a judgment from another country faces a related but distinct question, because Argentina does not treat a foreign judgment as automatically enforceable on its own terms; the route to make it count locally is separate from the one described here – see enforce a foreign judgment in Argentina. Choosing the wrong track at the outset – filing an ordinary claim where an executive one would have worked, or the reverse – is one of the more common ways this process ends up costing more than the invoice itself was worth.
Local counsel, translation of foreign-language contracts where needed, and the number of hearings the chosen route requires all sit on top of that structural choice. None of that is fixed in advance; it follows from which of the two litigation tracks the paperwork actually supports, which is why the assessment at stage three matters more than anything that comes after it.
The natural pause point comes once the mediation certificate is issued and before the claim is filed in court. At that moment the creditor has more information than at the start: whether the debtor engaged at all, whether it proposed a realistic payment plan, and whether it still looks like an operating business with assets rather than a shell that has already stopped trading. A creditor whose numbers still work at that point is the one who should actually move to recover an unpaid invoice in Argentina through the filing stage, rather than the one who files by default because the file already exists and stopping feels like a loss.
A partial offer at this stage deserves more weight than it usually gets. A debtor who proposes a lower amount paid promptly, against a full amount that would only arrive after a contested judgment and enforcement, is not necessarily conceding weakness – it can be the more rational outcome for both sides once the cost of the remaining stages is priced in honestly.
Continuing past this point only makes sense if the numbers still work. Three situations usually mean they do not.
Before deciding either way, it is worth taking the time to check the limitation period before you file, because a decision to pause that quietly runs past that point closes the option permanently, regardless of what the debtor's assets look like later on.
Yes, in practice. The claim is filed and argued locally through representatives acting under a power granted for that purpose, and the creditor's own physical presence is rarely required for the filing itself or for most of the procedural steps that follow it.
No. What matters is whether the invoice, together with delivery or acceptance evidence, is capable of supporting the faster executive route. Notarisation on its own is not the test that determines whether that route is available.
The file moves to the mandatory mediation step where that applies, and then to a court filing if mediation fails or the debtor does not appear. Silence at the demand stage does not stop the process – it simply removes the chance to settle before the mediation record opens.
The invoice sat against a shipment that already left and a delivery that already happened, and none of that gets easier while the file waits on someone's desk. In Argentina, the mediation certificate and the limitation period are the two clocks running underneath an unpaid invoice, and neither one pauses just because the debtor has gone quiet for a while.