Owed money by a company in administration or liquidation?

If you have money at stake with a company that has entered administration or liquidation, what you can do next depends on how you became owed money. This page sets out each route using what the official Australian sources publish, with a link to every one. Most people arrive here after searching a company name and finding an insolvency notice.

Every statement below links to its source. The Open Register publishes public-record information. It is not a law firm, not a debt collector, and nothing here is legal or financial advice. The external administrator appointed to the company is the authoritative source on that particular matter. Sources last checked 7 September 2026.

If you already know what happened and just want the company resolved, skip the reading. We will send you the entity file free, usually the same day. There are two ways in: as a consumer who paid a business that failed, or as a supplier, contractor or landlord who is owed.

The name on the shopfront, the invoice, the website or the contract is frequently not the name of the company on the notice. A trading name, a registered business name and a company name are different things: registered business names and companies sit on separate ASIC registers, while legacy trading names may still appear against an ABN. A company can also be renamed to its own ACN before or during a collapse.

Before you do anything else you want three facts: the legal name and ACN of the entity you actually dealt with, who has been appointed and in what capacity, and the dates on the notice. For claims in the insolvency itself, the appointed practitioner is the authoritative contact. Chargebacks and government entitlement schemes are separate routes, explained below. Writing to the wrong entity can waste valuable time when some of these routes have strict deadlines.

If you can't work out which company is yours, write to [email protected] with the trading name. We will send back the resolved entity, its former and registered business names, the appointed practitioner and the deadlines on the notice. There is no charge, and your address is used to answer you and nothing else.

The first route depends mainly on how you became owed money, not on how much you are owed. Start with the line that describes you.

The ACCC's guidance for consumers when a business goes bust is direct: "If you paid with a loan, credit card, debit card or through a secure payment provider such as PayPal, your financial institution or card provider may be able to get your money back by reversing the payment. This is known as a 'chargeback'. There are time limits on chargebacks, so contact your financial institution straight away."

AFCA's chargebacks factsheet confirms that insolvency does not by itself close this route: you can ask your bank for a chargeback where the merchant became insolvent after you paid and you have a valid chargeback right, on the basis that you paid for goods or services you did not receive.

On timing, be careful with numbers you read elsewhere. AFCA publishes no fixed day count. It says the card scheme rules impose time limits, that those limits vary, and that they usually run from one of three dates: the date you expected to receive the goods or services, the date you first became aware you would not receive them, or the date you paid. Individual banks also set their own lodgement deadlines, some of them short. This is why every source says the same thing — contact your bank now rather than waiting for the administration to resolve.

AFCA also notes a chargeback can take up to eight weeks for the scheme to decide.

If your bank refuses. Complain to the bank first through its internal dispute resolution process; ASIC requires a response no later than 30 calendar days. If you are unhappy with that response you can take the complaint to AFCA, which is free, and generally within two years of the bank's response.

Buy now pay later. Since 10 June 2025, BNPL providers must hold an Australian credit licence and be AFCA members, so a complaint route exists. The sources above do not establish that BNPL payments carry a chargeback right — ask your provider directly.

What we can send you. Your bank decides what evidence it requires. Our entity file can help you document which legal company sat behind the merchant or brand you dealt with, and the public insolvency event affecting it: resolved legal name and ACN, former and registered business names, the event and its date, and the primary ASIC source. Your own payment and order records are yours to supply. Ask for the entity evidence →

If you invoiced for goods or services and do not hold security over the debt, you will usually rank as an unsecured creditor. It is worth understanding what that means before spending money chasing it.

ASIC sets out the order funds are distributed in a liquidation: the costs and fees of the liquidation; outstanding employee wages and superannuation; employee leave; employee retrenchment pay; then unsecured creditors. "Each category must be paid in full before the next category is paid." Secured creditors sit outside that order and realise their security separately.

On what unsecured creditors actually receive, the most specific official figure is dated: in ASIC's Report 645, covering external administrators' reports for July 2018 to June 2019, "in 96% of cases, the dividend estimate was less than 11 cents in the dollar". That is 2018–19 data and we have not found a more recent ASIC figure, so treat it as an indication of scale rather than a current statistic.

Two different lodgements, often confused. To vote at a creditors' meeting you lodge details of your debt with the administrator or liquidator. A formal proof of debt is a different, later step: ASIC says the liquidator will notify you if funds might be available, will call for proofs then, must give at least 14 days' notice of the deadline, and will send you the form. The form itself is prescribed by regulation 5.6.49 of the Corporations Regulations — Form 535 in the general case. Attach your invoices and supporting documents, because a claim without evidence can be rejected.

The timetable in a voluntary administration. The first meeting of creditors must be held within eight business days of the appointment. The meeting that decides the company's future must be held within 25 business days (30 around Christmas or Easter). Creditors then choose between ending the administration, approving a deed of company arrangement, or winding the company up. A resolution passes on a poll only if both a majority in number and a majority in value vote for it. A deed of company arrangement binds all unsecured creditors, including those who voted against it.

In a liquidation, the liquidator must report to creditors within three months of appointment, covering the estimated assets and liabilities, what happened to the business, the likelihood of a dividend, and possible recovery actions.

What we can send you. The entity file you need to lodge against the right company: legal name, ACN, former names, the appointed practitioner and their published contact details, the appointment date and every deadline on the notice. Free. Ask for the entity file →

A retention of title clause in your terms of trade is not, by itself, protection. The PPSR is blunt about it: without registration "you will be an unsecured creditor. This gives you much less chance of getting your money or goods back if your customer can't pay and goes out of business." And: "If you don't register on the PPSR and your customer goes insolvent... the property will be lost and the insolvency practitioner may sell your goods for the benefit of all creditors."

The mechanism is section 267 of the Personal Property Securities Act: where a security interest is unperfected when the company goes into administration or winding up, the interest vests in the company immediately before that event. It stops being yours.

So the first thing to check is whether you actually registered. Search the PPSR against the company's ACN — the identifier highest in the order ARSN, ACN, ARBN, ABN, name is the one to use — and keep the search certificate, which is itself a legal record.

For supply from here on, the PPSR's timing rules for a purchase money security interest are: if the goods will be part of the customer's inventory, register before they take possession; if the goods will not be inventory, within 15 working days of possession. For a corporate grantor there is also a separate insolvency timing rule: a registration made more than 20 working days after the security agreement was signed may be vulnerable if the company enters external administration within six months of that registration.

What we can send you. A PPSR search against the wrong identifier can miss the registration you need to find. We will send the resolved ACN, former company names and registered business names we can resolve to the entity, so you can search the company you actually supplied rather than the brand on the delivery docket. Free. Ask for the resolved ACN and names → If your goods are still on the company's site, this is time-sensitive and worth reading the section below on professional advice.

Employee entitlements rank ahead of unsecured creditors in the distribution order above. Where the employer is in liquidation or bankrupt, the Fair Entitlements Guarantee is a safety net of last resort.

It covers up to 13 weeks of unpaid wages, annual leave, long service leave, up to 5 weeks pay in lieu of notice, and up to 4 weeks redundancy pay per full year of service. It does not cover unpaid superannuation — that is pursued through the ATO. Contractors are not covered, nor are "excluded employees" as defined in the Corporations Act, which captures directors and their relatives.

There is a hard deadline: you must lodge an effective claim within 12 months of the later of the date your employment ended and the date the employer went into liquidation or bankruptcy.

This route is free, official and does not need us. Go directly to the Fair Entitlements Guarantee claim page and to the ATO for unpaid super. The only thing we can add is confirming which legal entity employed you and what process it is in, if the notice and your payslip disagree.

The ACCC lists these among the ways consumers are left owed money, alongside a credit note with an amount left on it. Where a company is under administration it may honour gift cards or lay-bys, sometimes on conditions the administrator sets — for example requiring an equivalent spend. If the business is sold, the buyer "is generally able to choose what liabilities of the old business it will take on", so outstanding credit notes may or may not be honoured.

Otherwise, the ACCC's position is that on insolvency the holder becomes an unsecured creditor of the company. Where you paid by card, the chargeback route above is usually the more useful one, and the same evidence applies. Go to the card route →

During a voluntary administration, owners of property used or occupied by the company, and those who lease property to it, cannot recover that property. The administrator must tell you within five business days whether they intend to keep using it, and becomes personally liable for rent arising after those five business days if they do.

The official sources above do not address rent that fell into arrears before the appointment, and we are not going to guess at it here. That gap is one of the reasons this is a category where advice usually pays for itself.

Most of the routes above you can run yourself, and for small amounts you should. Advice tends to be worth its cost when one of these is true:

That last one catches people out. A liquidator can seek repayment of amounts the company paid you before it failed, and such a demand is not automatically payable. ASIC's guidance to registered liquidators says they should determine the date of insolvency and confirm the payments fall within that period before issuing a demand, and it quotes the court's statement that a demand should only be made where the liquidator believes, on reasonable grounds, that there is a proper legal and factual basis for it. Defences may also be available. This is one of the situations where independent legal advice can be worth its cost.

We do not act in any of these matters, and we are not paid by anyone to send you anywhere. If that ever changes, and we refer you to a professional who pays us for referrals, we will tell you before making the introduction. If you tell us what happened we will tell you what kind of practitioner handles it, and what the public record already shows about the entity, so that you are not paying someone to establish facts that are published. Tell us what happened →

We publish the resolved Australian insolvency register every weekday: every appointment matched to the legal entity, its former names, the trading names sitting over it, the appointed practitioner and the dates. If you send us a company or brand name, we will send back what the registers hold on it and let you know if another notice is captured against the same entity.

Get the register each weekday, or write to [email protected].