Client in Spain Stopped Paying for 6 Months — The Action Plan

A Spanish customer that has stopped paying for six months is no longer a collections problem. It is a triage problem. The signal pattern is consistent: emails go from "we will revert next week" to silence, the WhatsApp thread you were using to coordinate goes one-way, the contact who used to call back stops returning calls, and the accounts payable inbox bounces a soft auto-reply. By month six the conversation has crossed from cash-flow management into one of three structural states — the debtor is unable to pay, unwilling to pay, or already preparing to file concurso. The right action depends on which one. This page is the action plan: what to file in the first 14 days, what to verify before week four, and what to escalate by month two.

What six months of silence usually actually means

By day 180, the debtor has had two full quarter-end cycles to either restructure the payment or escalate it inside their organisation. Silence at this point is not a coincidence of inboxes. The three driving scenarios are roughly equally distributed: roughly a third of six-month-stale Spanish receivables involve a debtor with cash but disputed scope, where the silence is a tactical bid to reset the negotiation; roughly a third involve a debtor with deteriorating cash position who is paying critical suppliers and rotating others; and the remaining third involve a debtor already running the clock toward voluntary or involuntary concurso de acreedores under TRLC RDL 1/2020. Each scenario rewards different first-action choices.

The single most informative diagnostic is a Registro Mercantil pull, the most recent BORME entries, and the public-source check for late-deposited cuentas anuales. A Spanish company that has not deposited its annual accounts on time is signalling either organisational disarray or deliberate opacity, both of which correlate strongly with the third scenario. A creditor who orders the registry pack on day one of the 180-day mark gets the strategic clarity that the email chain has been hiding for the last sixty days.

The mistake creditors make at day 180 — waiting for one more reply

The most common error in the six-month-overdue file is waiting another month for a response that the debtor has decided not to send. Each additional month of delay before filing a burofax adds zero value to the file and consumes the creditor's only structural advantage, which is procedural priority. Spanish enforcement is a queue. The first creditor to file the monitorio at the relevant juzgado captures the embargo position on the debtor's bank accounts before the next creditor in line. The second creditor to file gets whatever balance remains after the first creditor's attachment is satisfied. The fourth creditor to file often gets nothing because the bank account is empty by the time their attachment lands.

The other common error is reading the silence as personal rather than structural. The Spanish CFO at the other end is not avoiding the call because they dislike the supplier. They are avoiding the call because they have no good answer to give and have been instructed by counsel or by ownership to stop creating documentary acknowledgements that can be used against them later. The right response is to stop chasing the conversation and start filing the documents that put the debtor on a procedural clock they cannot ignore.

Action by debtor profile — what fits the file at the 180-day mark

The 180-day signal is not a single signal. It is a fork. The creditor who treats it as a fork and runs the diagnostic before deciding the procedural route recovers materially more than the creditor who applies the same playbook to every file regardless of debtor profile. Spanish enforcement rewards files that match procedure to circumstance, and it punishes files that try to negotiate after the moment for negotiation has passed.

If the Spanish customer has gone silent for six months, what should we file first?

Send a Spanish-language burofax via Correos in the first 14 days. The burofax produces dated proof of receipt admissible in any subsequent monitorio, interrupts the five-year limitation under Article 1964 CC, and triggers a reply test that classifies the debtor into one of three buckets: pays or proposes a plan, disputes the scope in writing, or stays silent. In parallel, pull the Registro Mercantil and BORME to confirm whether the company has filed annual accounts on time and whether any structural change is registered. If the burofax produces silence and the registry pack is clean, file the proceso monitorio at the juzgado of the debtor's domicile under LEC Art.813 by day thirty. If the registry pack shows late accounts or any sign of pre-concurso preparation, accelerate the monitorio inside two weeks of the burofax and consider embargo preventivo under LEC Art.721 to capture the asset position before another creditor reaches it first. Waiting another month after the 180-day mark is the single costliest decision a creditor makes on this file type.