Your own liquidation service line, on our platform.

You create a case in your Insolnet dashboard with the company name, registered number and your client's contact details. The case is private to your firm at this point — no email goes to the director from Insolvency Direct.

The company's bank data is ingested either by CSV upload (export from the bank or your bookkeeping software) or, when the integration is live, via Armalytix open banking on the director's digital consent.

A deterministic categoriser classifies every transaction, seeded with the directors' Companies House appointments and known counterparties so connected-party transfers are flagged automatically. Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 then applies the IP-specific findings review — section 239 preferences, section 238 transactions at undervalue, section 214 wrongful trading, overdrawn director's loan accounts, unlawful dividends, misfeasance, and phoenix-prep patterns.

A categorised findings report appears on your dashboard within minutes. Alisdair Findlay, our accountant relationship manager, carries out the initial review, raises anything material with Joe Whiley — our licensed IP — and issues the report to you, then contacts you to discuss implications and options. You take the conclusions back to your client.

A director's loan account becomes overdrawn when the director's net drawings exceed their declared remuneration plus any properly declared dividends. In a trading company this is a common balance-sheet position and easily managed by year-end bonus or dividend declaration.

In a liquidation it is a personal debt repayable by the director to the company. The liquidator has a statutory duty to pursue recovery. There is no discretion to write it off.

Pre-appointment, options exist: the director can repay personally; a bonus or dividend can be declared (subject to distributable reserves); the loan can be netted off against other balances. Insolnet's pre-appointment bank analysis quantifies the figure precisely so these options can be considered before the position is fixed by appointment.

Misfeasance under section 212 of the Insolvency Act 1986 is the act of a director taking value from the company in preference to paying creditors when the company was already in difficulty. A common pattern is dividends declared while trade creditors are building up — even where each individual dividend was lawfully declared at the time, the totality of the conduct can amount to misfeasance.

A liquidator can apply to court to recover the value taken, personally from the director. The relevant test is whether the director ought to have concluded the company was insolvent or heading there.

The bank analysis identifies it by looking at the trajectory of director drawings against the trajectory of trade creditor balances over the trading life of the company. Where the patterns diverge — drawings continuing while creditors lengthen — the finding surfaces with the supporting transactions cited.

A preference under section 239 of the Insolvency Act 1986 is a payment or transaction that puts one creditor in a better position than they would have been in a pari passu liquidation distribution. The classic example: paying off a director's personal guarantee on a bank loan from company funds in the months before insolvency.

The lookback period is six months for unconnected creditors and two years for connected creditors (which includes directors, their families, and associated companies). The transaction is voidable — the liquidator can apply to court to unwind it.

In the bank analysis, preferences typically surface as connected-party payments in the run-up to insolvency, especially where they match outstanding personal guarantees or director loan balances. They are amongst the most commonly recovered claims.

Yes. Where your firm takes on the onboarding, KYC, questionnaire and Statement of Affairs work that Insolvency Direct would otherwise do, it is paid for that work at a fixed task fee from our partner rate card. In a CVL the fee is paid as a Statement of Affairs expense and disclosed to creditors; in an MVL it is paid by the company.

Many accountants prefer this model — it keeps the client touchpoints with your firm during the pre-appointment phase, maintains the relationship, and is paid work. Equally, you can hand the case to us if you prefer a lighter-touch role and we engage the director directly.

The fee is agreed with Joe Whiley case by case before the work starts and depends on the size and complexity of the case. It is a professional service fee for identifiable work, not a referral commission: nothing is paid for the introduction itself, because the Insolvency Code of Ethics prohibits it.

A Creditors Voluntary Liquidation (CVL) is for an insolvent company where the creditors will receive less than full payment. There is a creditor decision procedure to appoint the liquidator, and the liquidator has investigative duties — including the bank analysis Insolnet supports.

A Members Voluntary Liquidation (MVL) is for a solvent company where all creditors will be paid in full with statutory interest. There is no creditor procedure — the shareholders pass the resolution to wind up. The director makes a sworn Declaration of Solvency. MVLs are typically tax-driven (BADR / accumulated profits extraction / Section 110 reorganisation).

Insolnet's pre-appointment Bank Analysis is for CVL workflow only. The company is solvent in an MVL, so there are no claims to investigate — there is nothing to surface. MVLs have a separate referral path through Insolvency Direct.

Your client must consent to the bank analysis being carried out — it is their company's bank data, and you should have an open conversation with them about the situation and the possibility of liquidation depending on the outcome of the analysis.

They do not need to know about Insolnet by name. The pre-appointment engagement is between you and Insolvency Direct. We do not contact your client directly at this stage. When the Armalytix integration is live, the only email your client receives is the consent email from Armalytix, requested on your instructions.

You have full discretion over what to disclose to your client and when. The analysis report is yours to share or summarise as professional judgment dictates. As it is your client's own bank data being analysed, they are entitled to the underlying information on request — your discretion is over timing and framing, not over whether they can have it.

Before open banking, an insolvency case manager had to manually transcribe paper or PDF bank statements into a categorised transaction log in Excel. On a typical small-company case this took three to four days of competent professional time. The cost meant detailed analysis only happened post-appointment.

Open banking provides a regulated, consent-based mechanism for read-only access to a company's bank data, returned as structured machine-readable transactions. Combined with modern AI categorisation and IP-specific reasoning (Claude Opus 4.7 in our case), the same analysis takes minutes rather than days.

This is what makes pre-appointment review economically viable for the first time. The accountant gets to see what an IP would see, before any decision to liquidate is made — while the director still has the option to remediate, restructure or reposition the case.

Section 238 of the Insolvency Act 1986 makes voidable any transaction by which the company received significantly less than it gave. Common patterns: selling a vehicle to the director for £1; transferring stock or goodwill to a successor company for nominal consideration; a forgiveness of a debt owed to the company by a connected party.

The lookback period is two years before the onset of insolvency. The court will not unwind the transaction if it was entered into in good faith and for the company's benefit — but the burden of demonstrating this falls on the director.

In practice, transactions at undervalue often co-occur with section 239 preferences in the run-up to insolvency. The bank analysis identifies them by looking for asset disposals or write-offs that don't match arm's-length market values, especially where the counterparty is a connected entity surfaced by the Companies House cross-check.

Section 214 of the Insolvency Act 1986 makes a director personally liable to contribute to the company's assets where they continued to trade after the point at which they knew, or ought to have concluded, that there was no reasonable prospect of avoiding insolvent liquidation.

The test is partly objective (what would a reasonably diligent director with the same skills have known) and partly subjective (what this director actually knew). Continuing to take orders, increasing creditor exposure, drawing down further finance — all of these can sit at the wrong end of a wrongful trading claim if the company was clearly heading for insolvency.

Pre-appointment, the analysis identifies the trajectory: declining cash balance, lengthening creditor balances, continued drawings, HMRC arrears building. If the director took clear corrective action at a recognisable point (cut overheads, sought professional advice, ceased to take new orders), the claim weakens. If they didn't, it strengthens.

This is one of the harder claims for an IP to bring — the standard of proof is high — but where it succeeds, the director's personal exposure can be substantial.

A dividend is unlawful where it was paid in the absence of sufficient distributable reserves at the date of payment, contrary to Companies Act 2006 Part 23. The shareholder who received it can be required to repay where they knew, or had reasonable grounds to believe, the dividend was unlawful at the time. In a director-shareholder context — i.e. the typical owner-managed company — that knowledge test is usually met as a matter of course.

The liquidator can pursue recovery personally from the director-shareholder. Repayment is the principal remedy; in some cases the director may also face misfeasance proceedings under section 212 if the conduct amounts to a breach of duty.

Pre-appointment, the options are narrower than accountants sometimes assume. Retrospective re-classification of a dividend as remuneration is generally ineffective (Global Corporate Ltd v Hale [2018] EWCA Civ 2618) and carries its own PAYE/NIC consequences. What can be done is to have the director repay the sum, to correct a genuine posting error, or to show from contemporaneous management accounts that reserves did exist at the date of declaration. The bank analysis flags the dividend payments and, cross-referenced with the company's available reserves at each date, identifies which are at risk, so the director knows the position before a liquidator does.

The headline answer is six to twelve months from the date of liquidator appointment to formal closure. For the director, the visible part is much shorter: the period from the decision to liquidate up to and including the meeting of creditors typically takes three to four weeks.

After appointment, the director's involvement winds down. The remaining work — statutory notifications, advertising for creditors, gathering evidence, realising any remaining assets, dealing with HMRC, agreeing creditor claims, distributing any funds available — happens in the background and rarely requires director attention beyond responding to occasional information requests.

Formal dissolution typically follows three months after the final report to creditors. So the company is technically still in existence (in liquidation) for most of the 6–12 month window, but for practical purposes the director's involvement ends shortly after appointment.

A phoenix counterparty is a successor company that takes over the trade, customers, and key staff of the failed company — often incorporated by the same directors, sometimes in similar names with minor variations, sometimes as an established related entity that absorbs the business.

Phoenix activity isn't inherently unlawful. The Insolvency Act 1986 sections 216 and 217 restrict directors of insolvent companies from acting as directors of similarly-named successor companies for five years (with limited exceptions including IP-supervised sales), and a transfer of assets to the successor at undervalue gives rise to a section 238 claim. But a properly priced sale of goodwill, conducted through a regulated process, is legitimate.

The bank analysis identifies potential phoenix counterparties by cross-referencing the company's recent customer and supplier payments against Companies House records of the directors' other appointments. Where payments start flowing to a new entity controlled by the director or close associates, the pattern is flagged for review.

The accountant's role is often to recognise the legitimate-versus-improper distinction early. A planned sale supervised by an IP looks very different from an asset transfer that emerged in the days before liquidation.

During Phase 1 (Bank Analysis), Insolvency Direct does not engage formal KYC on the director. Your client remains your client throughout, and your firm's existing KYC procedures continue to apply. We are providing analytical work to your firm; the director is not a client of ours at this stage.

KYC formally kicks in at Phase 2, when the engagement transitions to liquidation. Insolvency Direct is then becoming the director's IP-elect, with statutory and regulatory obligations under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 and the IPA's Code of Ethics. The director provides ID documents, proof of address, and source-of-funds evidence where applicable.

You can take this work on for your client — uploading documents through your dashboard — and your firm is paid for doing so. Or hand off to us and we engage the director directly. Either model works.

If your firm has already completed equivalent KYC for AML purposes on the same individual within the past 12 months, our team can usually rely on a copy of your records rather than re-collecting documents — saving the director time.

Yes. Your Insolnet account is your firm's single login. Each case you create — whether via Start a Bank Analysis or Refer a CVL Directly — is linked to your account as the introducing accountant. The dashboard lists every active case with its phase, status, and progress at a glance.

There is no per-case fee for using Insolnet, no usage limit, and no minimum referral volume. The only commercial relationship is the fee paid to your firm for the onboarding, questionnaire and Statement of Affairs work it does where a case proceeds to liquidation. Nothing is paid for the introduction.

If you want multiple staff members at your firm to access the same set of cases, contact us — we can configure additional users under your firm's account with appropriate access controls. By default we keep the model simple: one accountant login per firm, with discretion to delegate within your firm offline.

A section 110 reorganisation (Insolvency Act 1986) is a particular use of MVL machinery to demerge a company into two or more successor entities, typically to enable shareholders to receive shares in subsidiary companies rather than a cash distribution. Common scenarios: separating the trading business from a property holding subsidiary; splitting two unrelated trades into stand-alone companies before sale; structuring a partnership exit cleanly.

A standard MVL is simpler — the company realises its assets, pays creditors in full with statutory interest, distributes any surplus to shareholders, then dissolves. Shareholders receive cash (or, occasionally, in-specie distributions of remaining assets).

A section 110 carries significant tax planning implications and almost always requires HMRC advance clearance under the relevant TCGA and CTA 2010 provisions. The accountant's role is central — the structure, the tax treatment, and the post-reorganisation share positions all need to be agreed before the resolution to wind up is passed.

Insolvency Direct handles section 110 reorganisations on the same MVL infrastructure, with additional clearance and document workflow on top. For accountants planning a section 110 demerger, talk to us early — the document set is more involved than a standard MVL and the timing is tighter.