Built for HackBelfast 2026

Predict Who Pays Late,Before You Invoice.

The next customer who’ll ghost your invoice is already on Companies House. PayShield reads the public record across the UK and Northern Ireland faster than you can. Few seconds, and you know whether to take the job, charge a deposit, or walk away.

Plugs into Xero, QuickBooks and other accounting models with a single API.

What Britain is owed
£70.4bn

Stuck in unpaid invoices to UK SMEs. The average pile is £66,770 per business. 38 close every day from late payment.

HoC Business & Trade Committee · Feb 2026

Northern Ireland · worst in UK
72.8%

Of NI SME invoices paid late. Belfast ranks in the top five worst UK cities. England 62.8% · Wales / Scotland 61.3%.

FreeAgent UK · Sep 2024 – Aug 2025

Check a customer· Companies House + UK PPR register

Try: BrightPlumb Ltd · Tesco PLC · Highgate Joinery Ltd · Meadow & Vale Architects LLP · Halford Bros (Builders) Ltd

How it works.

A typed pipeline from public UK & Northern Ireland data to a one-page brief. Sub-eight seconds end to end on the demo path.

01Step
/

Three parallel data pulls

You type a UK or Northern Ireland customer's name. We immediately open three public-data sources the rest of the market does not connect: the company's full Companies House record, the government's Payment Practices Reporting register where any sizeable UK or Northern Ireland buyer must declare how late they pay their suppliers, and a two-hop walk through their director network for shared officers, recent CFO exits, and disqualifications.

Most credit tools check one source and call it a score. We read three, in parallel, in under three seconds. That is the foundation everything else in PayShield is built on.

02Step
/

We score the risk

We feed the company's data through a smart rulebook we built from years of UK & Northern Ireland payment patterns. The same warning signs always lead to the same answer. A small construction firm whose payments are slipping and whose finance director just left will always come up as high risk. No guesswork.

Then AI writes the explanation in plain English so you can read it in ten seconds and act on it.

03Step
/

Score, reasoning, action

You get a 0–100 risk score with a clear traffic-light tier, the three or four reasons that drove it (cited from the data, not invented), and the exact deposit and Net-N terms to invoice on. A high-risk customer might trigger a 40% deposit on Net-14 with a chase from day seven. A clean customer might land at no deposit and Net-30. The decision is made for you.

Then it streams to your screen as it forms, so you read the score before the reasoning, and the reasoning before the action. By the time the action lands, you have already decided what to do.

What we look at

Six classes of signal. One score that reads like an accountant wrote it.

Methodology · PDFRisk Assessment Matrix v1.1Score thresholds · Action rules
  • Payment practices

    H1 vs H2 trend, late share, average days

    35 pts
  • Sector benchmark

    Construction 67d · Retail 45d · Pro services 42d

    25 pts
  • Director churn

    Officer changes and CFO swaps in last 12m

    15 pts
  • Filing anomalies

    Overdue accounts, dissolved-active flag

    15 pts
  • Network proximity

    Disqualifications, charges, insolvency

    10 pts
  • Phoenix patterns

    Recently incorporated co. sharing directors with mature ones

    heuristic flag
Pricing — founding customers

One paying customer
during the hackathon.

We are looking for one founding customer this weekend. £1 a month for your first twelve months. Then 50% off list price every month after that, for the lifetime of your subscription. The offer is open to any UK or Northern Ireland accountancy practice or B2B SME. Sign up before the pitch ends and your rate locks for life.

Practice

£49/mo

Accountancy practices, 1–15 staff

  • Unlimited customer scoring
  • Multi-client workspace
  • Integrate with Xero, QuickBooks
  • Branded chase emails
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Operator

£19/mo

B2B SMEs invoicing other businesses

  • 100 customer scores per month
  • Single workspace
  • Standard chase templates
  • CSV export
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