If they really filed, three clocks are already running
90 days
of your payments are reachable
A trustee can sue to recover money they already paid you, going back 90 days from the petition. Inside that window the law starts from the assumption they were insolvent, so you argue from behind.
$8,575
is the small-payment floor
Below it a single transfer in a business case is out of reach. It moves every three years, and the figure that counts is the one in force the day the case was commenced, which for the filing above is $8,575.
No fixed date
to file your proof of claim
A chapter 11 bar date is set by the court, not by the calendar. It arrives in the post, and that notice is the only thing carrying the date.
None of this waits for you. It starts the moment the petition is stamped, whether or not anybody has told you. And a receivable this size does not fail on its own: the reason people write about this years later is the customer who went under and took their supplier with them.
Those three numbers came off a real filing, not an example
Exhibit · a real filing from this week
First, find out whether it's even true
Somebody rings to say the company has gone under, and there's no quick way to check it before the end of the day. The filings are public, so this shouldn't be hard.
It isn't always true. "We filed" is also what people say when they'd rather not pay you this quarter, and it works because almost nobody checks. If there's no filing, you're not in a bankruptcy at all. You're in a collections problem, where you can still push, still call, and still sue. In most states, claiming a bankruptcy that doesn't exist to dodge a debt is fraud.
PACER
The official record. A one-off look is usually free, because fees are waived below $30 a quarter.
- Case numbers, docket entries, a chapter
- Doesn't say what chapter 11 means for your invoice
- Doesn't work out how far back a trustee can reach
- No way to paste a customer list into it
This site
16,010 business cases from 91 of the 94 courts, rebuilt daily. Free, no account.
- The same record, in plain English
- The 90-day lookback as real dates, plus the claim rule for that chapter
- A whole customer list at once, checked in your browser
- Not the authority. For anything material, PACER is
What we miss, said plainly
The Southern District of Texas publishes no feed at all, so anything filed in Houston reaches us only through RECAP and arrives late. Very recent filings can take a day or two to appear anywhere. So read a blank result for exactly what it is: we hold no business filing under that name. It isn't proof nobody filed, and we're not going to dress it up as one. If the money is material, run the free live search across all 94 courts at CourtListener.
Before you search anything
Ask them for the case number.
Anyone who has genuinely filed has one. It's on every notice the court sends, and it takes ten seconds to check here or anywhere else. A customer who filed will give it to you. A customer who is buying time usually won't.
Chapter 7 or chapter 11 decides whether you see any of it
It is the first thing to look for on the filing, and the two aren't variations on a theme. One means the company is being switched off. The other means it intends to keep trading and pay something.
Chapter 7
6,274
cases we hold
Liquidation. The business stops.
A trustee sells what there is and pays out in a fixed order. Secured lenders first, then priority claims, and unsecured trade creditors last. In most trade cases the money runs out before it reaches the last group.
What you do: file the proof of claim anyway, stop shipping, and treat the balance as unlikely rather than certain.
Chapter 11
9,127
cases we hold
Reorganisation. The business carries on.
The company keeps operating and proposes a plan to pay creditors something over time. Old unpaid invoices usually get a fraction. Goods you ship after the filing are a different and far better class of claim.
What you do: decide fast whether to keep supplying, and if you do, get the terms in writing. Post-filing debt is treated far more seriously than the balance they already owe.
Neither chapter stops a trustee reaching back for payments you already banked. That is the 90-day window above, and it applies to both.
The day they file, your collection stops
Nobody has to send you anything first. The petition itself does it. Section 362(a) says a filing “operates as a stay, applicable to all entities” of, among other things, “any act to collect, assess, or recover a claim against the debtor that arose before the commencement of the case under this title” (11 U.S.C. 362(a)(6)).
The calls, the letters, the demand, the lawsuit, and the setoff against anything you owe them (11 U.S.C. 362(a)(7)). Carrying on is how an unpaid invoice becomes a sanctions hearing.
The stay does not decide whether you keep shipping. You can stop, ask for cash up front, or agree to new terms. A qualifying post-filing shipment may receive administrative-expense treatment, which is different from the old unpaid balance. Get advice before extending more credit.
What that leaves you doing this afternoon
- Stop the collection activity on the old balance. Tell whoever runs the calls today, not on Monday.
- Get the case number and confirm it. Search it here or on PACER. If they can't produce one, treat the filing as unverified and say so in writing.
- List every payment they made in the last 90 days. That is the starting file your lawyer will want. Ordinary-course payments, new value and other defences can shrink what is recoverable.
- Diary the claim deadline the moment the court's notice arrives. Missing it can shut you out of a distribution.
- Decide about shipping before they ask. Deciding under pressure on the phone is how people end up extending more credit to a company in chapter 11.
What you get when you open a case
Specimen · case 26-12858
- Company
- Chiropractic Evolved, LLC
- Chapter
- 11, a reorganisation
- Petition filed
- August 7, 2026
- 90-day window
- May 9, 2026 → August 7, 2026
- Claim deadline
- set by the court, read the notice
- Preference floor
- $8,575 aggregate floor when the debts are mainly business debts
The written statement
A search you can hand to somebody
The free search above reads our archive of 16,010 cases. The statement re-runs it live across all 94 federal bankruptcy courts, then puts the answer on one dated page: every case found, the court, the chapter, the 90-day statutory lookback counted from the real petition date, and the claim rule for that chapter. The court notice still controls the actual claim deadline.
It is built to be forwarded. A lawyer, a credit committee or the customer themselves can read it without you explaining what a chapter is.
- Every name variant we searched, listed, with the public query URL so anyone can re-run it themselves
- Dated and timed, so a search that found nothing is still something you can show
- Printable, no account, nothing to cancel
$7
one company, one statement
Get the statementYou name the company after paying, or search first and buy from the result. One $7 payment. Nothing renews. Full refund within 30 days. Terms · Refund policy.
Some customers are a worse bet before they place an order
The government guarantees the loans people take out to buy a franchise, and it publishes what happened to every one of them. Across the 58 brands where at least 100 loans have finished, $190 million was written off. Two brands of almost exactly the same size sit at opposite ends of that.
Share of finished loans the lender wrote off. Bars run to a 40% axis. Source: the SBA 7(a) loan book, computed 2026-07-29.
A charge-off means the borrower stopped paying and the government took the loss, which almost always means that business failed. A good operator can still fail at a strong brand. But DICKEY'S BARBECUE PIT put 54 of 158 finished loans into default and CLUB PILATES put none of 151, which is worth knowing before you set a credit limit.
The one you heard about is rarely the only one
If one customer is in trouble the others are worth a look the same afternoon. Paste your customer, tenant or subcontractor list and it tells you which names are in the record, what chapter, and when they filed. The matching runs in your browser and the list is never uploaded, because a customer list is the business and nobody sensible hands one to a site they just found. You don't have to take that on trust: open your browser's network tab before you press the button and watch that nothing goes out.
What comes back for a name we hold
For a name we don't hold, it says exactly that and stops. Read that as we found nothing, never as they're fine. A company can be weeks from filing and still be missing from every public record.
Businesses only
We publish nothing about individual bankruptcy filings. We exclude them to avoid consumer-reporting and privacy risk. Every record here is a business entity.
We hold more case records than docket histories, and the difference matters. Case records (who filed, which court, which chapter, what date) come from the public historical court record and reach back years. Docket entries come from the courts' live filing feeds, which carry only about 24 hours at a time, and we began archiving those on 28 July 2026.
So a case may show a full record and no entries, or three entries when the real docket has three hundred. An empty or short list of entries is a gap in our collection, never a statement that nothing happened.
For the complete and authoritative docket, use PACER or the court directly.