Skip to content
pr•time

For companies that deliver against invoice

Your customer goes bankrupt.You hear on the day it is published.

You follow your entire customer list in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce — not a single lookup — and we report every bankruptcy with the published deadline, into the mailbox you already use (Outlook or Gmail). You give us the list, or it builds itself from your email correspondence.

Ask about the pilot

Pilot phase: we set your customer list up by hand, and you tell us whether it holds. Free during the pilot. Afterwards the automatic list from your mailbox, the partner radar, is included in the Pro plan (CHF 39 per month, up to 100 partners). The hand-maintained list is Company Watch: 50 / 200 / 500 companies for CHF 29 / 79 / 149 a month, from Pro.

Why it is usually noticed too late

The existing tools have to be asked. Credit agency, commercial register portal, gazette search — all of them answer only once somebody asks. But nobody asks until the suspicion is already there. By then the goods have shipped and the deadline is running.

You keep delivering

Weeks pass between the preliminary bankruptcy notice and the moment word gets around. In that time goods go out that nobody will pay for.

The deadline runs without you

The call for claims names a date by which your claim must be filed. It is in the gazette — not in your inbox.

Nobody reads the gazette daily

It appears every working day with thousands of notices. Searching it by hand for your own customers is something nobody actually does — so nobody notices.

Three moments, two of them with a deadline

Figures for the last twelve months, counted in our own holdings on 14.08.2026.

Preliminary bankruptcy notice

15,961

in the past year

The earliest signal — it appears before the bankruptcy is formally published. Anyone who sees it stops shipping goods against invoice.

Call for claims

8,980

with a published deadline

This is the deadline by which your claim has to be filed. It is stated in the notice, and we show it as a date.

Schedule of claims

8,000

with a published deadline

This states whether and in what rank your claim was admitted — and by when that can be challenged.

A customer is bankrupt: what to do now

The deadline, what goes into the proof of claim and what realistically comes back. Short, and not legal advice. Creditreform counted 14,958 company bankruptcies in 2025, 30 % more than the year before.[6]

The deadline: 1 month from the call for claims

The bankruptcy office publishes the call for claims in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce (SHAB). From that publication, creditors have 1 month to file their claim with supporting documents (Art. 232 para. 2 no. 2 DEBA).[1,2,3]

It is a procedural (non-forfeiting) deadline. A late filing is still possible until the proceedings close. But you bear the costs caused by the delay, and you may lose your vote (Art. 251 DEBA).[1,2]

What goes into the filing

  • the amount of the claim
  • the reason: delivery, service, contract
  • copies of the evidence: invoices, contracts, delivery notes, reminders
  • your details: company, address, contact person, bank details for the payout

You file with the bankruptcy office named in the call for claims, usually the office at the company’s registered seat. Many bankruptcy offices provide a form on their website.

What realistically comes back

According to WEKA, the bankruptcy dividend averages below 6 %, and in 98.3 % of bankruptcies creditors get nothing. WEKA does not name a primary source.[5]

For the uncovered part you receive a certificate of loss. It becomes time-barred after 20 years at the earliest.[4]

Filing is still worth it: without it there is neither a dividend nor a certificate of loss.

How to find out in time

  • The call for claims appears in the SHAB on amtsblattportal.ch.
  • Whether a company is bankrupt you can look up for free on registerbuch.ch, with a link to the official publication.
  • With Protime the warning sits above your reply draft when the company you are writing to is bankrupt. Before you deliver or reply.

registerbuch.ch

Common questions about filing a claim

How long is the deadline for filing a claim in a Swiss bankruptcy?

1 month from the publication of the call for claims in the SHAB (Art. 232 para. 2 no. 2 DEBA). It is a procedural deadline: a late filing is possible until the proceedings close, but you bear the costs of the delay and may lose your vote (Art. 251 DEBA).

Where do I file a claim in a bankruptcy?

With the bankruptcy office named in the call for claims, usually the office at the company’s registered seat. Many bankruptcy offices provide a form on their website.

What goes into the proof of claim?

The amount, the reason for the claim, copies of the evidence (invoices, contracts, delivery notes, reminders) and your details including bank details for the payout.

How much will I get back in a bankruptcy?

Usually little: according to WEKA the bankruptcy dividend averages below 6 %. For the uncovered part you receive a certificate of loss, which becomes time-barred after 20 years at the earliest.

A customer company has gone bankrupt: what do I do?

Stop delivering against invoice, look out for the call for claims in the SHAB and file your claim with the named bankruptcy office within 1 month, with evidence.

General information, not legal advice. The published call for claims and the bankruptcy office are what governs.

Sources

  1. [1] Canton of Solothurn: notes on filing a claim (PDF, German)
  2. [2] law.ch: deadline for filing claims (German)
  3. [3] Canton of Fribourg: opening notice, call for claims (German)
  4. [4] Canton of Aargau: bankruptcy proceedings (German)
  5. [5] WEKA: bankruptcies in Switzerland, 12.05.2026 (German)
  6. [6] Swiss federal SME portal: sharp rise in bankruptcies 2025 (Creditreform figures)

1 in 32

That is how many Swiss companies were affected by a bankruptcy notice in the last twelve months — 16,080 in total. With a hundred customers on invoice that works out at roughly three a year. On top of that come 755 debt-restructuring moratoria.

The whole list, not the single lookup

Credit agencies are built around the single lookup: per company, per case, per report. So anyone with two hundred customers follows none of them — it does not pay off, and nobody maintains two hundred lookups by hand.

We read the gazette in full every working day anyway. Your list simply comes along — whether it holds twenty names or two hundred makes no difference to our effort. That is why you can follow a whole customer list here, and not just the one case you already have a bad feeling about.

How you set it up

Two steps. The second has two variants.

Step 1

Connect your mailbox — Gmail or Outlook

Once, with no software to install. That is where the morning brief arrives, and the notices about your customers are in it. Without this step there is no delivery path — we do not send notices to a mailbox we do not know.

Step 2 · where the customer list comes from

Variant A · Company Watch

You give us the list

An export from your accounting system is enough, or a list of your receivables. Fully controlled — and it also covers customers you never email at all.

Variant B · partner radar, no list to maintain

The list builds itself from your email

Who you actually correspond with is already in the mailbox from step 1. From that we derive the companies you follow — freshly, every day. A new customer is included from the first exchange onwards, without anyone having to remember.

The two variants can be combined.

How variant B works — and where it deliberately stays silent

  • Real correspondence only: a company is included once you have replied at least once — a newsletter in the inbox is not enough.
  • Freemail addresses (gmail, bluewin, gmx …) do not identify a company and are skipped.
  • If a domain cannot be resolved to at most three companies, you follow no company at all rather than one on suspicion — better one notice too few than a false alarm about the wrong company.
  • Your email addresses do not leave our system. Only the domain and the company name resolved from it are used for your notices.

What we do not promise

Where deadlines are concerned, false reassurance costs more than a missing notification. So here is what we cannot do — before the conversation, not after it.

  • Our notices cover what is PUBLISHED — not solvency. A customer may have been unable to pay long before anything appears in the gazette. This replaces neither a credit check nor your dunning process.
  • Sole proprietorships not entered in the commercial register do not appear. Anyone buying from you as a private individual or as an unregistered sole proprietor will not show up in these notices.
  • About half of all bankruptcy notices carry the deadline as a date. For the other half we show the wording as published — we never convert it, because the deadline shifts to the next working day and public holidays differ by canton.
  • We do not advise. Every notice links the official publication, and that is what governs — what you do with it is for you or your lawyer to decide.

What is not there yet

coming

Customer list by CSV

Today we set your list up by hand — during the pilot that is the more honest approach anyway.

coming

A link to your accounting system

So the list maintains itself instead of being updated by hand. Not built yet.

We are looking for a few companies for the pilot

Write to us with how many customers you invoice and how large your largest open item is. We set the list up, and the next morning you see whether there is anything useful in it.

Ask about the pilot

Or write directly to marc@protime.ai.

To pass on — the full scope on four pages:

Funktionsübersicht (PDF, German)Feature overview (PDF, English)