Recovery gets yesterday’s money back.
Protect stops tomorrow’s.
Every recovery mandate we run starts the same way: an invoice that should never have aged. Protect works the other end of the problem — the credit policy, contracts, screening and collection discipline that decide whether your book goes overdue at all.
And it is not a defensive function. A working credit capability is what lets you sell more on terms, not less. With limits, screening and discipline behind you, you can extend credit confidently to accounts you would otherwise have declined — and price the slow payers instead of losing them.
Sources: Atradius Payment Practices Barometer UAE 2025; Wusala Indexes (preview readings).
The Portfolio Health Score
Before we change anything, we score your receivables book across five dimensions — the five that actually determine whether an invoice gets paid on time.
Terms
Are your payment terms enforceable, and are they actually applied?
Screening
Do you know who you're extending credit to before you do it?
Discipline
Does chasing happen on a cadence, or when someone gets around to it?
Concentration
How exposed are you to your largest few payers?
Security
What do you actually hold if a debtor stops paying — cheques, guarantees, retention of title?
Six levers on your DSO
Credit policy that actually binds
Most UAE ledgers extend credit by habit, not by rule. We write a credit policy with real limits, approval thresholds and stop-supply triggers — and make it enforceable inside your finance function rather than a document nobody opens.
Screening before you extend credit
The cheapest recovery is the debt you never took on. We screen counterparties before terms are granted — trade licence validity, ownership and group structure, credit-bureau standing, litigation and cheque history, and trade references that are actually checked.
Contract hygiene
Recovery is decided long before the invoice is late — in the contract. We audit your terms for the clauses that determine whether a debt is enforceable: payment terms and triggers, late-payment interest, security (cheques, PDCs, guarantees), retention, notice provisions, and the jurisdiction clause that decides where you can actually enforce.
Early-warning monitoring
A debtor's behaviour changes before their payments do: partial payments, longer approval loops, new disputes on old invoices, promises that slip. We monitor the ledger for those signals and flag accounts while the money is still there — not at day 120.
Concentration and exposure
Most UAE mid-market ledgers are far more concentrated than management believes. We map exposure by debtor, sector and emirate, and stress the book: what happens to your cash position if the top three payers each go 60 days late?
A dunning ladder that runs itself
Collection discipline fails because it depends on someone remembering. We install a fixed cadence — who is contacted, when, by whom, in what tone, and what happens at each step — so escalation is automatic and consistent instead of personal and awkward.
Assessment, then a quarterly rhythm
Free 48-hour audit
We score the overdue book and show you what's recoverable. This is where most clients first see how concentrated their risk really is.
Portfolio assessment
The Health Score across all five dimensions, with a written credit policy, redlined terms and a concentration map. Fixed fee, scoped to your ledger.
Install
We put the dunning cadence, limits and escalation triggers into your finance function, and train the people who run them.
Quarterly review
DSO tracked against your sector benchmark, watchlist accounts reviewed, policy tuned. Ongoing retainer.
Protect is advisory work, priced as a fixed fee and retainer rather than a success percentage — there is no collected sum to take a share of. We quote it after the free audit, once we have both seen the state of the book.
Protect: common questions
How is Protect different from debt collection?
Collection is reactive and paid on success — we recover money that is already overdue. Protect is preventive: it changes the credit policy, contracts, screening and chasing discipline that decide whether invoices go overdue in the first place. Most clients start with a recovery mandate and add Protect once they see what the audit reveals about the book.
What does Protect cost?
The portfolio assessment is a fixed fee scoped to the size of your ledger, and ongoing monitoring runs as a quarterly retainer. Unlike our recovery work, it is not success-based — there is no collected sum to take a percentage of. We quote both after the free audit, so you can see the state of the book before committing.
How quickly does DSO actually move?
Chasing discipline and dunning cadence usually show up within one or two payment cycles. Credit policy and contract changes only affect new business, so their impact builds over quarters rather than weeks. We set a DSO target against your sector benchmark and track against it — we do not promise a number we cannot control.
Do you need access to our accounting system?
No. We work from exported aging reports and your standard contract templates. Where a client wants continuous monitoring we can integrate with the ERP or accounting platform, but it is not required to start.
Start by seeing the book clearly.
The free 48-hour audit tells you what’s recoverable today. The Health Score tells you why it got there — and what to change.