a supplier in trouble leaves a paper trail.

Monitoring supplier financial distress means watching the public documents a struggling company generates (filings, judgments, notices, director and auditor departures) and reading them in the order they appear. The trail is real and mostly free to read. It's also later than most people assume, and parts of it get deleted on a timetable.

So here they are: what each signal is, where it becomes public, and how far behind the event it already is by the time you see it. No regulation tells you to watch the public record for this. It's here because a supplier failing is expensive whether or not anyone's making you watch.

the signals, and where each one is published.

the record is later than it looks.

The German statistical office is unusually direct about this. Insolvency petitions only enter its figures after the court's first decision, and it notes that the actual date of the petition is in many cases nearly three months earlier. The case you read about in August was very often filed in May.

The same gap runs through everything filed on a statutory deadline rather than as news. A UK private company has nine months from its year end to file accounts, so a set filed exactly on time describes a year that ended three-quarters of a year ago. An insolvency announcement is a confirmation, not a forecast.

Which is the argument for reading the cheap, early, boring signals: the late filing, the resigned auditor, the new charge over assets. Waiting for the document that names the outcome is waiting too long.

the public record deletes itself on a statutory timetable.

The public record isn't an archive that accumulates. Several of its most useful parts get erased on a statutory timetable, and almost nobody plans for it.

• German online insolvency announcements are deleted at the latest six months after the proceeding is lifted, and other insolvency-law publications one month after their first day of publication.
• A county court judgment in England and Wales stays on the register for six years, but one paid within one calendar month is removed from the public register altogether, as though it never happened.
• Sources move. The OFSI Consolidated List of Asset Freeze Targets closed on 28 January 2026, and the UK Sanctions List is now the source. A process pointed at the old one kept returning clean results.

So a quarterly check steps over parts of the record. The case for watching continuously is made out of records retention law.

how common is this, really.

Common, and the rate runs highest in exactly the size of company most people buy from. The Insolvency Service recorded 23,938 registered company insolvencies in England and Wales in 2025, and put the rate for the twelve months to June 2026 at 50.5 per 10,000 companies on the Companies House effective register, or about one in 198.

The Insolvency Service also publishes 2025 against a different denominator, and that's where size shows. Measured against the 2.1 million active companies in the ONS Inter-Departmental Business Register rather than the 4.9 million on the effective register, the England and Wales business insolvency rate for 2025 was 116 per 10,000, against the 52.5 per 10,000 (one in 190) that the effective register gives for the same year. On the IDBR basis the highest rate of all was among businesses with twenty to forty-nine employees, at 269 per 10,000, with fifty to 249 employees at 220 and micro businesses at 114.

Two things follow, and the second one gets misread constantly. Those rates aren't comparable with the 50.5 above, which uses a different denominator over a different twelve months. And a high rate isn't a high count. Most companies are micro businesses, so most insolvencies are micro businesses too. The size breakdown says a mid-sized supplier is likelier to fail than a small one. It doesn't say most failures are mid-sized.

Destatis reports German courts registering 24,064 requested business insolvencies in 2025, 10.3% more than 2024 and the highest since 2014, with creditor claims of around €47.9 billion. Eurostat's EU bankruptcy index rose 2.5% in the fourth quarter of 2025 against the third, reaching its highest level since the first quarter of 2019. The Administrative Office of the US Courts counted 591,850 bankruptcy filings in the twelve months to 31 March 2026, up 11.9%, with business filings up 11.4% to 25,960.

One caveat, because these figures get misused. Eurostat publishes a weighted index rather than a count, and says national absolute figures aren't directly aggregated because laws and practices differ, so any single number for “EU business failures” is invented. National counts aren't comparable with each other either. They're arithmetic on different units.

And the largest caveat of all: insolvency statistics only count closures that run through an insolvency procedure. Companies House recorded 787,120 dissolutions in the year to March 2026, against roughly twenty-four thousand insolvencies. Most suppliers that stop being able to supply you never appear in an insolvency figure at all.

do a lot of this yourself, free, this afternoon.

If you have ten suppliers and an afternoon, you can cover a real part of this without paying anyone.

• Companies House Follow is free and emails you as soon as a filing is accepted onto a company's history, linking you to the filing history where the document is free to download. For UK suppliers this is the single highest-value thing on the list. The public data API is free too, at 600 requests per five minutes, with a streaming endpoint for change events.
• The Gazette is the UK's official public record and where insolvency notices legally have to appear. Search is free and so are email alerts on a company.
• CourtListener, run by the non-profit Free Law Project, gives five free PACER docket alerts, plus ten more if you install their RECAP browser extension. PACER itself charges ten cents a page, capped at three dollars a document, and doesn't bill you at all below thirty dollars a quarter.
• The European e-Justice Portal links the national insolvency registers of the Member States that have completed the Article 25 interface, which is most but not yet all of the twenty-six bound by Regulation (EU) 2015/848. Denmark sits outside it entirely. Article 27(1) makes the core information free to search. Check your supplier's country is actually on there before you rely on it.
• The UK Sanctions List is free in searchable, CSV, XML and several other formats.
• State WARN listings carry US layoff notices. Note that the Department of Labor keeps no database, and publication is up to each state, so coverage is uneven.

what's left after the free afternoon.

Three things.

Matching. The name on the filing is rarely the name on your contract. Groups restructure, trading names differ from registered ones, and a similar name in another country is how this work goes wrong. Every supplier has to be resolved to a registered legal entity first, and the match has to be checkable.

Coverage per country. The list above is strongest in the UK because the UK publishes unusually well. Germany, France, Poland and the US each surface trouble somewhere different first. One global feed run over every supplier finds the ones that were easy to find.

Doing it in the quiet weeks. Alerts are easy for a month. The work is week sixty, when nothing has happened for a year and the checks still run. It's also the part an auditor asks about, which is why our weekly log arrives whether or not there was anything in it.

every public source we read →
see a full weekly watch log, anonymized →

this is not a credit score.

The two get confused, and they answer different questions. A credit rating is an opinion about creditworthiness produced with a defined ranking system, and issuing those professionally in the EU is a regulated activity under Regulation (EC) No 1060/2009. We don't do that. We don't score suppliers, rank them, or predict which will fail.

What we send is a document with a date and a link. You decide what it means for your business, because you know things about that supplier that no public source contains: what they make for you, how fast you could replace them, and what you're owed.

There's plenty the record can't show, too. Where a supplier files accounts, its cash position appears on the filed balance sheet: at one date, months after that date, and nothing between filings. A privately held US supplier files nothing at all. A lost anchor customer, a covenant breach or a funding round that failed to close may never appear anywhere. Watching public sources works, and earlier than waiting to be told. What was never published, it cannot see. Negative news about a supplier covers part of that gap, with its own limits.

common questions about supplier distress.

Version 1.2, 26 August 2026. Every statistic here is attributed to the body that published it and was current on 2 August 2026; insolvency statistics are revised and reissued, so check the source before you quote one. Publication deadlines and retention periods are taken from the governing rules rather than from practice, and practice varies. This page is a description of public records, not legal, financial or credit advice.