If you’ve got a business of your own, you’re probably familiar with customers not paying every now and then. The best case scenario is that they simply forgot to pay and when you remind them, they immediately pay the invoice. But in some cases, the debtor refuses to pay the money, no matter how many times you contact them. If this happens to you, it’s time to hire a professional to collect the money the debtor owes you. The question is: who do you turn to? Do you hire an attorney or a Debt Collection Agency?

We understand that the first thing that comes to mind if you need help collecting debts, is hiring a Debt Collecting Agency. Debts Collecting Agencies (DCAs, of in Dutch: incassobureau) are agencies specialized in recovering money and they have the time, expertise and resources to do so. With all their knowledge and resources, they can recover your money a lot faster than you can do yourself. We understand you don’t want to pay a lot of money to hire a DCA, because recovering the money still needs to be fruitful. The costs for hiring a DCA vary, but a lot of them have a ‘no collection, no fee’ principle; if they don’t succeed in collecting the money from your debtor, you don’t have to pay them for their service.

Besides DCAs, there are also attorneys you can hire for debt collection. The difference with a DCA, is that an attorney can start a legal procedure to recover the owed money. So hiring an attorney is a good choice if you might have to take legal action. Doing so is only effective when the debtor owes you a large amount of money, because hiring an attorney can be quite expensive. Attorneys mostly charge hourly fees and/or collect one-third of the amount of recovered money. Also, you need to pay for any costs you make by going to court if you do so.

Yes, you can hire a Debt Collection Agency, but what happens if you need to take legal action to recover your money? You still need to hire an attorney and the whole process of recovering the owed money takes even more time. To prevent all this, you can hire a DCA that works with attorneys. This way, you can profit from the conditions of a DCA and still take legal steps with an attorney if necessary. Where a normal DCA needs to stop, a DCA with attorneys, like e-Legal, can take legal steps to recover your money. e-Legal works in The Netherlands, so you can for example hire an attorney in Rotterdam (incasso advocaat Rotterdam). But there are many other DCAs that work with attorneys in other parts of the world!

If you want to increase the chances of recovering your money, you shouldn’t choose between hiring an attorney or a DCA. You can get the best of both worlds and hire a DCA with attorneys!