Software vendors, managed service providers and IT consultancies often find that an invoice for delivered code, licences or support hours goes unpaid once the client disputes performance or simply stops responding. SOLUTIO provides debt recovery services for IT services disputes across borders, starting with an honest assessment of whether the contract and the delivery record support a claim worth pursuing.
The profile repeats across the sector. A fixed-fee development project is invoiced on milestones, and the final milestone is disputed once the client claims the build is incomplete. A subscription or licence fee lapses into non-payment after a change of ownership or a change of technical lead on the client side. A support retainer runs unpaid for several cycles before anyone on the vendor side escalates it past the account manager.
In each pattern the amount at stake is rarely trivial, and the client is rarely judgment-proof. What is usually missing is a clean paper trail connecting the invoice to a specific, accepted deliverable. Before any cross-border debt recovery step is taken, we test whether that trail exists, because its absence is the single most common reason a technically valid invoice becomes hard to collect.
On IT files the claim stands or falls on a small set of records, not on the length of the contract.
A vendor with a signed acceptance certificate and a clean change log recovers on a materially different footing than one holding only a purchase order and a set of unanswered emails.
Debtors in this sector rarely deny the contract exists. They dispute performance instead. The most common lines are that the software did not meet the agreed specification, that the vendor invoiced for work never formally requested, or that a defect notice was sent and never addressed. A fourth line, less about the merits, is a challenge to the governing law or forum clause buried in standard terms.
Each of these is defeated with the same tools: a signed acceptance record, a change log showing who approved the disputed scope, and evidence that any defect notice arrived after the payment term expired rather than before it. Where the debtor also carries exposure on adjacent work, for example an unrelated unpaid freight or logistics claim against the same corporate group, that parallel exposure often changes how quickly a settlement is offered. Where the file also touches related deployment agreements, our work on software licensing disputes covers the licence-specific defences that sit alongside a pure services claim.
The route starts with a written assessment, not a demand letter. A structured review such as a pre-action debtor check establishes whether the debtor holds recoverable assets and whether the paper trail supports the amount claimed, before any fee is incurred on the substance of the dispute.
Where the assessment is positive, the next step is usually a formal demand referencing the specific acceptance or delivery evidence, followed by negotiation. If negotiation fails, the file proceeds either to the court or arbitral forum named in the contract, or to a claim in the debtor's home court where no forum clause exists. The procedure at that stage depends heavily on where the debtor sits; the recovery process in Germany, for instance, runs on a different rhythm from a claim against a debtor incorporated elsewhere, which is one reason the jurisdiction is confirmed before the route is fixed.
It depends on what the licence agreement says about governing law and forum, and on whether the client accepted the software or raised a documented objection. We test both before advising on a route.
That defence is tested against the acceptance record, the defect log and the timing of any complaint. If the complaint arrived after the payment term expired, it carries less weight than the debtor may expect.
Timing depends on whether the debtor contests the claim and on the forum the contract points to. A limitation period applies in every jurisdiction we work in, and we confirm the applicable period before advising on timing.
A licence fee or a services invoice does not become easier to collect the longer it sits unpaid, particularly once the client's technical objections harden into a settled position and the contract's own deadlines for raising them pass unused. For a vendor weighing whether to pursue the file or write it off, that window is the fact that matters before any other decision is made.