Secondary placement
Your primary agency worked these commercial accounts and sent them back — closed, uncollected, with a recommendation for the write-off column. Nothing about placing them with us asks you to replace that agency or run a procurement; secondary placement is its own category, and the accounts are already itemized on a return report. What a returned file usually needs is not another round of calls but the work a call center cannot do — asset and property records, a person at the debtor’s place of business, and enforcement through counsel in the debtor’s own county.
What’s included
How it works
Send the accounts as they came back to you — your primary agency’s return or closing report, the original placement date, the payment history with credits applied, the contract or purchase orders, and the invoices. Batches are the normal unit here; returned inventory moves in groups, not one file at a time. We read the list before anything is placed and tell you which accounts we would take, which we would not, and what each one is missing.
The first pass is records. We re-verify whether the entity still exists and still operates, whether its right to transact business in Texas has been forfeited, whether the same people are running the business under a successor name, and what real property, equipment, and bank relationships sit behind it. Age constrains the route as well: Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.004 sets a four-year limitations period for an action on a debt or on an open or stated account, and for an open account the statute provides that the cause of action accrues on the day the dealings between the parties ceased rather than on the invoice date. None of that is a phone call, which is why a returned file can look different on paper than it did the first time.
Where the records support it, someone goes to the debtor’s place of business — a different kind of pressure, and a reliable way to learn whether the operation is still there at all. Accounts that justify enforcement go to counsel in the debtor’s own county, nationwide through a network of licensed collection attorneys. We are a collection agency, not a law firm, so we do not file suit, file liens, or give legal advice, and court costs are reviewed with you before anything is filed. Anything collected is remitted to you with a statement of the amount collected and the agreed fee.
FAQ
Usually nothing about the debtor has changed; what changes is what gets checked. We have worked commercial accounts for more than twenty-five years — upward of ten thousand of them, and more than $250 million recovered across that history — and the pattern on returned files is consistent. They come back after calls, letters, and a credit-bureau trace, and rarely after anyone pulled property records on the principals, verified the entity’s standing with the state, or stood in the debtor’s lobby. Those three answers decide whether there is anything here to work, and if they come back empty we will tell you the account is not collectable rather than keep it open.
No, and that is the point of the category. Secondary placements are accounts a previous agency already worked and returned, and public solicitations define and price them as their own line for exactly that reason — a creditor can use a secondary agency without disturbing the primary relationship or the contract behind it. You keep your primary agency, your first-placement workflow, and your reporting with them unchanged. We only see the third-party placements they have already closed and sent back.
Age matters, but not in the way most people assume. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.004 sets a four-year limitations period for an action on a debt or on an open or stated account, and for an open account the statute provides that the cause of action accrues on the day the dealings between the parties ceased — not on the invoice date — so an account whose last activity is recent may have more runway than its oldest invoice suggests. What age really changes is the debtor: companies close, move, and re-form, so the longer a file sits the more of the work is locating rather than collecting. Send the placement date and the last-activity date with the file. Whether a specific claim is still actionable is a legal question for counsel, and it is one of the first things counsel looks at on an aged account.
Not necessarily, and a returned file is where this is most often missed. Under Tex. Tax Code § 171.255(a), if the corporate privileges of a corporation are forfeited for failure to file a report or pay a tax or penalty, each director or officer is liable for each debt of the corporation created or incurred in Texas after the date the report, tax, or penalty was due and before the privileges are revived — subject to the defenses in § 171.255(c), which cover a debt created over the director’s objection or without the director’s knowledge despite reasonable diligence. Section 171.2515(b) applies that subchapter, including § 171.255, to a taxable entity whose right to transact business in the state is forfeited, so it is not limited to corporations. Separately, principals often keep operating under a new name, which makes successor investigation worth running before an account is written off. Whether a particular debtor fits any of this is a question of records first and, where personal liability is asserted, of counsel.
Send what the account already has: the invoices, the contract or purchase order, any credit application or personal guaranty, a payment history showing credits and the last payment date, the original placement date with your primary agency, and that agency’s return or closing report. The closing report matters more than people expect — it tells us what was already tried and which numbers and addresses are dead, which keeps the first week from repeating work. If the file is incomplete, send it anyway and we will tell you what else it needs.
A batch is the normal unit, because that is how returned inventory arrives — a list off an aging report rather than a single claim. Send the list and we will mark the accounts we would take and the ones we would not, with the reason for each. The accounts worth re-placing tend to share a feature: an operating debtor, real property in the entity’s or a guarantor’s name, a signed personal guaranty, or an entity forfeited by the state with identifiable officers. A long returned list usually sorts into a workable group and a tail that genuinely is not collectable, and we would rather say so than carry dead files.
The fee is agreed before you place anything, in writing, for the batch as a whole. There is no retainer and no upfront charge, so the net-back you are measuring is on files you had already written down to zero. If an account goes to counsel for enforcement, court costs and filing fees are reviewed with you before anything is filed, so no cost appears without your sign-off.
You get a named person and a direct line, and status on any placed account whenever you ask for it. What you will not get from us is a client portal, a real-time dashboard, scheduled electronic reporting, or an API into your ERP — we do not run those, and we would rather say so before you place than after. If automated reporting into your own system is a procurement requirement, a volume agency is the better fit for your primary placements, and this is still the right door for the files they send back.
Tell us what you're owed and we'll tell you exactly how we'd go after it. The review is free, and you pay nothing unless we collect.
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