A customer entering a creditors' arrangement can happen to anyone: credit management decides what it costs
4 November 2026, 08:13
On 2 November the board of The Italian Sea Group, the yacht builder based in Marina di Carrara, chose the €220 million offer under which the whole business will be sold within a concordato, the arrangement with creditors by which a business in crisis proposes, under the supervision of the court, to pay its creditors in part. According to the plan filed with the Court of Florence, preferential creditors will be paid in full and unsecured creditors about 10%. Almost all suppliers are among the unsecured, because the law puts ahead of them the costs of the procedure, employees, agents, artisan businesses and a large part of taxes.
For a supplier with €200,000 of open invoices with the yard, that means collecting about €20,000, and not straight away, while wages, materials and loan instalments still have to be paid in full, and the gap shows up in the cash forecast of controlling. A customer getting into trouble can happen to anyone who sells on credit; how much that crisis will weigh on the accounts, however, is decided in the months before, order after order, and good credit management makes sure it remains a loss to absorb and does not drag the seller down too.
How exposure grows unseen
Even in well-run businesses, exposure to a customer in difficulty rises along entirely ordinary paths. The long-standing customer who has been paying a little later for two months keeps receiving goods, because losing it seems worse than a delay and because for years it has always paid. The credit limit entered in the management system stays the one set a few years earlier, while the customer has meanwhile grown or weakened. Overdue invoices show up in the receivables ledger, confirmed orders do not: a buyer who pays on time but multiplies purchases in the months before the crisis stays in line with the due dates and meanwhile leads the supplier to produce, and then invoice, more than it would have granted. And the switch from bank receipts to bank transfers, which leaves the customer to choose the day it pays, often comes with a polite request that nobody has any reason to refuse.
What to set up
The credit limit, also called the trade credit line, is the maximum amount granted to a customer, and it is calculated on two amounts: need, that is, its average monthly purchases multiplied by the months of payment terms granted, and reliability, which for an existing customer is read in its payment history and for a new one in the company register extract, the financial statements and the limit suggested by credit information agencies. The lower of the two is chosen: above need the limit serves no purpose, above reliability the business exposes itself more than the customer deserves.
Then the limit has to be put to work. In the management system it is entered in each customer's record, and the block is set up: a new request that, added to open invoices and to what has already been confirmed, takes the exposure above the limit, or that arrives while invoices are overdue beyond the margin the business has set itself, say fifteen days, stays on hold until the administration decides. The salesperson flags and proposes, but does not release it alone. Every week the managing director, or the credit manager in larger businesses, ranks customers by exposure, measures the share of receivables sitting with the top names and checks how each one pays: a bank receipt that comes back unpaid, the switch to bank transfers, replies to reminders that keep being put off are the moments to cut the limit, ask for an advance or stop deliveries.
When the customer is late: the debt in writing
An email from the customer that answers a reminder without disputing the invoices and gives a payment date counts as an acknowledgement of the debt: it allows the supplier to ask the court for an injunction, that is, an order to pay, and may be enough to make it immediately enforceable, especially if it comes from a company address or by certified email. The reminder, therefore, does not ask whether the customer will pay but when, and lists invoices and amount: "We show invoices no. 45 and 52 as open, for €12,000: could you tell us the date on which you will settle them?". It has to be done early, because once the application for the arrangement is published, if the business asks for protection, creditors can no longer start or continue actions against its assets.
On the most exposed customers, shift the risk
The credit limit reduces the loss, but does not remove it. On the customers that weigh most, the risk can be taken out of the business. Credit insurance sets a limit for each buyer and, if that buyer does not pay or enters a procedure such as an arrangement with creditors, refunds the share set in the policy, usually most of the claim. Non-recourse factoring does the same by another route: invoices are assigned to a specialist company that advances them and takes on the risk of non-payment, within the limit it has approved for that customer; with recourse factoring, by contrast, the risk stays with the supplier, which must repay the advance if the payment does not arrive. Non-recourse assignment can also be done without telling the customer: the factoring company agrees with the supplier not to give notice, the supplier keeps collecting on its behalf and the commercial relationship stays as it was, while the Italian factoring law makes the assignment effective against third parties through payment of the price on a certain date. A supplier of the Tuscan yard with its invoices assigned without recourse, therefore, does not depend on the plan's percentage: it is the factoring company that pays it.
With credit managed this way, a customer in an arrangement with creditors is still a hard blow; but it is a loss the business knows in advance, within a threshold chosen by the seller, and one the business can absorb.
This article was prompted by a news item published in Shipping Italy on 2 November 2026.