Will this client pay me?
Check how a UK company actually pays its suppliers before you agree terms. We read the payment practices reports large businesses are legally required to publish and turn them into one payment-risk score — average days to pay, invoices paid late, and the trend.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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What the check shows
Six signals that tell you whether you'll be paid
Every figure comes from the company's own published report or the Companies House register — nothing is estimated or modelled from a credit bureau file.
Average days to pay
How long the company actually took to settle supplier invoices in its latest reporting period — self-reported to the government.
Invoices paid late
The share of invoices not paid within the agreed terms, plus the share still unpaid after 60 days. The single most useful number for a supplier.
Direction of travel
Whether payment performance is worsening, improving, or stable across the company's successive reports — not just the latest snapshot.
Filing behaviour
Companies House compliance signals — overdue accounts and confirmation statements often show up before payments start slipping.
A single 0–100 score
All of the above weighted into one payment-risk score with a band, so you can compare prospects on the same scale.
A decision, not a data dump
One plain-English line telling you what the record says and what to do about it — deposit, staged invoicing, or standard terms.
Where UK company payment history actually comes from
Since 2017, large UK businesses have had to publish a payment practices report every six months. It states, in the company's own words, how long it took to pay supplier invoices, what share it paid within 30 days, what share it left past 60 days, and what share it failed to pay within the terms it had agreed. Around 10,000 companies report; the rest are below the threshold and publish nothing.
That dataset is the closest thing there is to an honest answer to "does this company pay on time" — it is the buyer's own account of its behaviour, filed under a statutory duty. It is also awkward to use: a single 100MB CSV with 52 columns and one row per reporting period. FinancialInsight ingests it, joins it to Companies House, and reduces it to a score, an evidence list, and one sentence of advice.
When a company is below the reporting threshold — which covers most UK SMEs — there is genuinely no payment history to show. We say so explicitly, fall back to Companies House compliance signals, and flag the result as lower confidence rather than inventing a number.
A payment-risk score answers a narrower question than a credit score: how fast does this company pay, not is it solvent. For the second question, run a full UK company credit check — composite score, Altman Z-Score, insolvency notices and director screening.
Data source: Payment practices and performance reports, Department for Business and Trade. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Frequently asked questions
The most reliable answer comes from the company's own filings. Large UK businesses must publish a payment practices report twice a year stating their average days to pay and the percentage of invoices they settled outside agreed terms. FinancialInsight reads those reports and turns them into a 0–100 payment-risk score, so you can see how a prospective client has actually treated its suppliers before you agree terms.
Search the company by name or Companies House number above. If it publishes payment practices reports, you will see its average days to pay, the share of invoices paid within 30 days, the share paid after 60 days, the share not paid within agreed terms, and whether that record is improving or worsening — plus a link to the original report on the government service.
Roughly 10,000 of them. Under the Reporting on Payment Practices and Performance Regulations 2017, a company or LLP must report if it exceeds two of three thresholds: £36m annual turnover, £18m balance sheet total, or 250 employees. Smaller companies publish nothing, so no invoice-payment history exists for them — for those we fall back to Companies House signals and flag the assessment as lower confidence.
Standard UK commercial terms are 30 days, and the Prompt Payment Code asks signatories to pay 95% of invoices within 60 days. An average in the low 30s with a small share of invoices outside agreed terms is healthy. Averages well past 60 days, or a high percentage of invoices paid outside agreed terms, are the two figures worth arguing about before you sign.
Practical options, roughly in order of strength: ask for a deposit or payment up front, invoice in stages rather than on completion, shorten your terms, add statutory late-payment interest to your contract, or take out trade credit insurance. Whatever you agree, put the due date in writing and start chasing the day after it passes.
Yes. The payment-risk check runs on public data published under the Open Government Licence and is free to use with no signup. A full FinancialInsight credit check — composite credit score, Altman Z-Score, director background check, Gazette insolvency screening and sanctions screening — is free for your first 3 checks after signup.
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