Look after your client through liquidation — without doing the forensic work yourself.

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. Joe Whiley, our IP and accountant relationship manager, also reviews independently and 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 you take on the questionnaire completion and KYC work that Insolvency Direct would otherwise do, a case set-up fee is paid to your firm on appointment of the liquidator.

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

The fee level is discussed and agreed with Joe Whiley on engagement. It depends on the size and complexity of the case. We treat it as a professional service fee, not a referral commission, because what you're being paid for is the work — the questionnaire, the document gathering, the KYC.

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.