---
title: "A customer has stopped paying. What the filings tell you about whether they can"
description: "Before you write it off or escalate, the register answers one question: are they in trouble, or just squeezing you? Here is how to read the filings for it."
author: "Pradeep Vanga"
published: 2026-09-11
updated: 2026-09-11
category: "Guide"
tags: ["receivables", "due-diligence", "charges", "msme"]
canonical: https://entiva.in/blog/customer-not-paying-what-filings-show/
publisher: "Entiva"
---

# A customer has stopped paying. What the filings tell you about whether they can

The invoice went out in April. It is now September. You have had four "next
week"s, one "the client hasn't paid us either", and last month, a partial
transfer that felt more like a gesture than a payment.

You are trying to decide one thing, and it is not whether they owe you. It is
whether they **can** pay you, or whether you are near the front of a queue that
is about to get much longer.

The register will not tell you what is in their bank account. Nothing public
will. But it answers a narrower and surprisingly useful version of the
question: has this company been getting weaker, has it stopped doing the things
a functioning company does, and is there somebody standing ahead of you in the
queue.

Here is how to read it, cheapest checks first.

## You are not imagining the scale of this

India's Ministry of MSME runs a delayed-payment portal,
[Samadhaan](https://samadhaan.msme.gov.in/), where a micro or small enterprise
can file against a buyer who has not paid. The homepage is a dashboard of live
counters with no as-on date, and it shows **two different totals**. Read on
14 September 2026:

The first counter, applications filed by micro and small enterprises, was
**2,56,892**. The same page now tells suppliers to file new applications at a
different portal, the [MSME ODR portal](https://odr.msme.gov.in/). Treat that
2,56,892 as a stock of applications, not a live flow.

A second set of tiles counts cases at Micro and Small Enterprise Facilitation
Councils: **1,12,691 cases filed**, **₹31,672.96 crore** recorded as payable,
65,528 of those cases disposed. That is not a subset of 2,56,892, and it is
not a total you can add to it.

Both count only the disputes somebody formalised. Whatever the true number of
unpaid invoices is, it is larger.

The point is not to make you feel better. It is that the decision you are
making right now, keep supplying or stop, escalate or settle, is one that a few
hundred thousand suppliers make badly every year because they make it blind.

## Check one: are they still a company at all

Free, thirty seconds, and it is the check that occasionally ends the
conversation.

Look up the company's status on the MCA master data search. If it comes back
**Strike Off** or **Under process of striking off**, the entity you have been
invoicing has been removed from the register or is being removed. That is not a
payment problem, it is an existence problem, and it changes who you chase and
how.

This is not exotic. In our snapshot of the register taken on 8 September 2026,
**more than one in four entities carried a strike-off status**, which we have
written up in full in
[how many companies in India actually still exist](https://entiva.in/blog/how-many-companies-in-india-are-still-active/).

Other statuses that should stop you where you stand: **Under Liquidation**,
which means a liquidator now controls the assets, and **Under CIRP**, which
means an insolvency resolution process has begun and a moratorium applies to
recovery action against the company. We cover
[what every status means](https://entiva.in/blog/company-status-strike-off-meaning/) separately.

And check you have the right entity while you are there. If you have never
looked a company up before, start with the
[two-minute check on whether a company is real](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-check-if-a-company-is-real/)
and come back here. Group companies with near-identical names are extremely
common, and the invoice, the purchase order
and the bank account do not always name the same one. Confirm by
[CIN](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-read-a-cin-number/), not by name.

## Check two: who is ahead of you in the queue

This is the check almost nobody does, and it is the one that most changes what
you should do.

On the MCA portal, under Master Data, there is a separate item called **View
Index of Charges**. It is free. It lists every charge registered over the
company's assets: the lender, the amount secured, the date, and whether the
charge has been satisfied.

A charge is a lender's registered claim over the company's property. If a bank
lent against the company's plant, receivables or stock and registered that
charge, then in a wind-up that bank is a **secured** creditor. You, holding an
unpaid invoice, are an **unsecured** one. Secured comes first.

So the index of charges answers a question you cannot ask anyone directly: if
this company runs out of money, how much of what it owns is already spoken for?

Three patterns worth knowing how to read:

**No charges at all.** The company has not borrowed against its assets, or has
not borrowed from anyone who registers charges. On its own this is mildly
reassuring, and it also means there may be less collateral supporting the
business than you assumed.

**Several open charges, none recent.** Ordinary secured borrowing. Note the
amounts against what you know of the company's size.

**A new charge created recently, or several in quick succession.** A company
that has been pledging assets in the same months it stopped paying you is a
company raising money against what it owns. That is a signal, and it is a
signal you can see for nothing.

One caution, and it matters. **A charge stays on the register until the company
files to say it has been satisfied.** Old, fully repaid loans routinely sit
there for years because nobody filed the form. So an open charge is not proof
of a live debt. It is proof of a claim that was registered and never formally
released.

## Check three: have they stopped filing

Every company has to file its financial statements and its annual return each
year. Form AOC-4 carries the accounts, Form MGT-7 the annual return. Both hang
off the annual general meeting, which for most companies has to happen by 30
September.

Late filing is not free. Under the Companies (Registration Offices and Fees)
Second Amendment Rules 2018, notified on 7 May 2018, an overdue annual filing
attracts an additional fee of **₹100 per day**, charged separately for the
annual return and the financial statements, wherever the filing period expired
after 30 June 2018. It does not stop accruing and there is no cap.

Which is why a filing gap is such a loud signal. A company that has not filed
for two years is not being forgetful. It is watching a meter run, and it either
cannot produce accounts, cannot afford the auditor, or has stopped caring
because there is nothing left to protect.

**What to look for, in order of severity:**

| What you see | How to read it |
| --- | --- |
| Filed on time, every year | Boring. Boring is good |
| Filed late, but filed | Slow, disorganised, or short of cash at year end |
| Last year missing, this year not due yet | Watch it. Not yet a finding |
| Two or more consecutive years missing | The company has stopped doing what functioning companies do |
| Filings stop and directors start resigning | The two together are worse than either alone |

That last row is the one to take seriously. Director changes are filed
separately, and a cluster of resignations in the same window that the filings
stopped is a different story from either on its own.

## Check four: the direction of travel

Everything so far is free. This one is not, and it is usually where the ₹100
goes.

The accounts attached to the AOC-4 give you turnover, profit or loss, and the
balance sheet, for each year the company filed. One year tells you very little.
**Three years tells you the direction**, and direction is what you are actually
after.

Read them in this order:

1. **Revenue, year on year.** Falling revenue with rising trade payables is a
   company paying its suppliers later because it has less coming in.
2. **Trade payables.** If the figure is climbing while revenue is flat, you are
   not being singled out. Everyone is being paid late.
3. **Borrowings**, read against the index of charges. Debt going up while
   revenue goes down is the shape you least want to see.
4. **The auditor's report.** Auditors are careful people who occasionally say
   something plain. A going-concern remark is not a formality.

We have written separately on
[how to find a private company's revenue](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-find-a-private-company-revenue-india/),
and on
[getting the documents out of the portal](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-download-mca-documents/),
which is fiddlier than it should be.

Bear in mind what you are reading. Accounts filed in January 2026 describe the
year that ended in March 2025. By the time you read them they describe a
company that existed eighteen months ago. They are a direction, not a snapshot.

## What the register absolutely will not tell you

This is the part that most posts on this subject skip, and skipping it is how
people talk themselves into false confidence.

**It will not tell you whether they can pay you this month.** There is no cash
position in a public filing. A company with good accounts can be out of money
by Tuesday.

**It will not tell you whether they are paying other people.** A supplier who
is being paid and one who is not look identical from outside.

**It will not tell you about disputes, GST defaults or bounced cheques.** None
of that is in the MCA record.

**It will not tell you the truth, only what was filed.** The register holds
filings. Filings lag, filings can be wrong, and a company in trouble is not
usually the one filing promptly.

**And it does not tell you what to do.** Nothing here is legal advice, and the
right move in a real dispute depends on your contract, your evidence and your
appetite, none of which are on the register.

What the register does give you is calibration. You go from "I have a bad
feeling" to "this company has not filed for two years, has three open charges,
and lost two directors in the spring". That is a different conversation, both
with yourself and with them.

## What the filings change about your options

Broadly, four moves, and the filings push you towards one of them.

**Keep supplying, on tighter terms.** Defensible if the company is filing, the
accounts are stable, and the delay looks like working-capital pressure rather
than collapse. Shorten terms, take advances, cap exposure.

**Stop supplying, keep talking.** The usual answer when the filings have gone
quiet but nothing formal has happened. You stop adding to the exposure without
turning it into a fight.

**Escalate.** If you are a micro or small enterprise, delayed payment under
the MSMED Act is still the low-cost formal route, and the substantive law
behind it is worth knowing about. New applications are now directed to the
[MSME ODR portal](https://odr.msme.gov.in/) rather than to Samadhaan itself. Section 15 of the MSMED Act 2006 requires the buyer to pay
by the date agreed in writing, and caps that agreed period: "in no case the
period agreed upon between the supplier and the buyer in writing shall exceed
forty-five days from the day of acceptance". Where there is no written
agreement at all, payment is due on the "appointed day", which section 2(b)
puts at fifteen days after acceptance. Note which way round that runs:
forty-five days is a ceiling on what can be agreed, not an entitlement every
buyer has.

If the buyer is a company, the overdue amount may already be on the public
record in its own words. Twice a year it has to name its micro and small
suppliers and the sums outstanding past 45 days, in
[the filing where your buyer says what it owes you](https://entiva.in/blog/msme-form-1-what-a-buyer-declares-it-owes/).

Section 16 then does the work. Interest on a delayed payment is compound, with
monthly rests, "at three times of the bank rate notified by the Reserve Bank",
and it applies "notwithstanding anything contained in any agreement between the
buyer and the supplier or in any law for the time being in force". The contract
cannot bargain it away.

The protection is not universal: Chapter V runs in favour of a "supplier",
which section 2(n) confines to micro and small enterprises. A medium enterprise
is outside it. That is a real lever and many
suppliers never mention it.

The insolvency route has a floor. The Central Government fixed the minimum
default at **one crore rupees** by notification S.O. 1205(E) dated 24 March
2020, under the proviso to section 4 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code
2016. Section 4 sets the threshold for the whole of Part II, which is where an
operational creditor's application lives, so below ₹1 crore the Code is not
available to you whatever the merits. Above it, sections 8 and 9 set out the
demand notice and application route.

One exception worth knowing if your debtor is small: a separate notification of
9 April 2021 sets **ten lakh rupees** as the threshold for the pre-packaged
insolvency resolution process available to MSME corporate debtors.

**Settle cheap and move on.** Sometimes the filings tell you the queue is long,
the assets are pledged, and forty paise in the rupee today beats a judgment in
four years. That is not defeat, it is arithmetic, and you can only do the
arithmetic if you have looked.

## The order to do this in

1. **Status and CIN.** Free. Confirms the entity exists and is the one you
   invoiced.
2. **Index of charges.** Free. Tells you who ranks ahead of you.
3. **Filing history.** Whether the last two years were filed at all. This is
   visible before you pay for anything.
4. **The accounts, three years of them.** This is the paid step, and it is the
   one that converts a hunch into a direction.
5. **Director changes over the same window.** Cheap to add once you are pulling
   documents anyway.
6. **Write down what you found, with the date.** If this becomes a dispute,
   "the register showed no filings since 2024 when I checked on 11 September
   2026" is worth having, and worth having with the document behind it.

If you want the whole set in one go rather than eight passes through the
portal, that is what we do:
[what a full retrieval contains](https://entiva.in/what-you-can-find/), and
[what it costs](https://entiva.in/pricing/), registry fee included.

Whatever you decide, decide it having looked. The worst version of this
situation is not the customer who cannot pay. It is the supplier who kept
shipping for another two quarters because nobody spent ₹100 and twenty minutes
finding out.

*Written by the Entiva team, who read Indian company filings for a living. Not
legal advice.*

## Frequently asked

### Can I find out if a company can afford to pay me?

Not directly. The register shows what a company filed, not what is in its bank account today. What it does show is the direction of travel in the accounts, whether filings have stopped, and whether lenders hold registered charges over the assets. Those three together are the closest the public record gets to an answer.

### How do I know if my customer has pledged its assets to a bank?

Check the index of charges on the MCA portal, which is free. It lists charges created over the company's assets and whether each has been satisfied. A lender with a registered charge ranks ahead of an unsecured trade creditor.

### What is the minimum amount to file an insolvency petition in India?

₹1 crore. The Central Government fixed the minimum default at one crore rupees by notification S.O. 1205(E) dated 24 March 2020, under the proviso to section 4 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016. Section 4 governs the whole of Part II, which is where an operational creditor's application sits, so below that figure the Code is not the route. A separate ₹10 lakh threshold applies to the pre-packaged process for MSME corporate debtors.

## Related reading

- [How to find out what a private Indian company earns](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-find-a-private-company-revenue-india/): Private Indian companies don't publish their accounts, but they do file them. Here's where the revenue figure actually sits, and how far to trust it.
- [What a company's status actually means: Active, Strike Off, Dormant](https://entiva.in/blog/company-status-strike-off-meaning/): A company's status on the register is one word that changes everything about whether you should sign. Here's what each one means, and what to do next.
- [How to download a company's documents from the MCA portal, and what it actually costs you](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-download-mca-documents/): The MCA charges ₹100 to see a company's filings. Here is the full route through View Public Documents, the four limits nobody warns you about, and when it is worth it.

_Published by Entiva (https://entiva.in/), which retrieves documents from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs' View Public Documents service on a customer's behalf. Entiva is not affiliated with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and does not resell another provider's database. Free lookups use MCA company master data._