The Delhi insolvency professional and the creditor's paper trail

Her ex-Goldman skill — the one she never expected to use again — was creditor matching. In 2009, when the credit crisis meant every institution had to reconcile who they actually owed money to versus what their ledger said they owed, Ananya built spreadsheets that cross-referenced bank confirmations against collateral pledges against letter-of-credit advices. The work was tedious and the stakes were real. One error meant a ₹500-crore bank's claim was filed with wrong documentation, and the claim was rejected. She became, over time, meticulous about the fine print: the stamp on the guarantee document, the notary date on the deed, the signature block on the secured-credit facility letter.

In March 2026, an insolvency landed on her desk that required exactly that skill.

🗓️ The annual ritual

The Insolvency & Bankruptcy Code (IBC) of 2016 created a statutory process for corporate insolvency that, in theory, runs for 180 days with a possible 90-day extension. For large corporate insolvencies — particularly those involving multiple states, multiple secured and unsecured creditor classes, and complex collateral — the process is intensive. The Insolvency Professional receives notice of the case, the corporate debtor's financial records, and a list of known creditors from the debtor's books. From that point, the IP must:

1. Initiate the creditor meeting — convene all known creditors within 14 days
2. Circulate the claim form — publish a standardized form and a deadline (typically 30 days) for creditors to file proofs of claim
3. Verify claims — cross-check submitted claims against the debtor's records, bank statements, and third-party confirmations
4. Adjudicate disputed claims — resolve creditor-to-debtor discrepancies (claim amount, secured/unsecured classification, priority status)
5. Present the claim register — at a second creditor meeting, table the verified register for approval

On paper, this is straightforward. The Indian company law machinery has done insolvencies for decades. The issue Ananya had always encountered was the fourth step: verification. A creditor in Tamil Nadu files a claim for ₹50 lakhs in unpaid deliveries. The claim references a Purchase Order from 2022, an invoice from 2023, and a delivery challan signed by the debtor's Bangalore warehouse manager. The debtor's books list the transaction, but the amount is ₹45 lakhs. Was there a credit note? A discount? An offset against a different invoice? The warehouse manager has left. The invoice file is in Bangalore. The debtor is insolvent and no one answers the phone. Verification took time. In a 180-day case, verification ate thirty to forty days of the statutory window.

1. ⚖️

   Day 1–14 — Case admission & creditor notification

   NCLT admits the insolvency application. IP is appointed. Notice published in newspapers and NCLT portal. Creditors are notified.

2. 📨

   Day 15–45 — Claim filing & proof submission

   Creditors submit proofs of claim (POC) with supporting documents — invoices, delivery chalan, contract evidence, bank statements.

3. 📋

   Day 46–90 — Claim verification (THE BOTTLENECK)

   IP cross-references each claim against debtor records, bank statements, witness statements, third-party confirmations. Disputed claims are adjudicated.

4. 🗂️

   Day 91–120 — Claims register approval & resolution process

   Verified claims register is presented at second creditor meeting. Approved claims enter the insolvency resolution process or liquidation waterfall.

5. ₹

   Day 121–180 — Resolution plan approval or liquidation

   Resolution plan is approved by 66% of creditor value, or liquidation proceeds. Funds distributed to creditors in statutory priority order.

⚠️ What very nearly happened

The insolvency that landed on Ananya's desk in late March 2026 was a ₹180-crore SME — a Delhi-registered manufacturing company that had supplied auto-components and plastic moldings to Tier-2 and Tier-3 automotive suppliers across the western and southern regions. The company had stopped payments in January 2026 after its primary customer, a mid-size Tier-1 supplier in Gujarat, had itself gone insolvent. The manufacturing company's cash flow froze within weeks.

When Ananya opened the case, the known creditor list from the company's books contained seventy-three entries: vendors, banks, employee salary arrears, tax authorities. The NCLT notification was published on April 2nd. The creditor meeting was scheduled for April 16th. The claim-filing deadline was set for May 2nd. When the May 2nd deadline arrived, Ananya's office had received four hundred and thirty-seven proofs of claim.

She expected one hundred and fifty.

The unexpected claims came from two sources. First, the company had subcontracted work to smaller job-shops across Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu, each of which was now filing claims for the work done in the preceding six months. Second, the company's main factory was located near Bhiwadi in Rajasthan, and a number of small supply vendors — suppliers of raw plastic pellets, tool-repair services, packaging vendors — had filed claims that were not in the company's ledger at all. Ananya pulled the bank statements from the company's State Bank account (the only operating account) and cross-referenced. The vendors were real; the payments were real; the amounts roughly matched. But the company's financial team — a controller and two junior accountants — had categorized them differently or not at all. Some were listed under "miscellaneous manufacturing costs" instead of "vendor payables". Some had been paid in cash and recorded against a general "advances" account, now impossible to trace.

By May 10th, Ananya had to declare the verified claims register and schedule the second creditor meeting for May 25th. Fourteen days to verify four hundred and thirty-seven claims.

"एक लेजर एक परिवार की कहानी हो सकती है — पर पड़ोस के सत्तर घरों की कहानी नहीं।"

— A ledger can tell one family's story — but not the story of seventy houses in the neighborhood.

At two o'clock on May 11th, Ananya was sitting at her desk with her junior associate Priya, a twenty-eight-year-old CA who had moved to Delhi insolvency from Big 4 audit. Priya had already spent four days on the phone with vendors across five states, trying to confirm delivery dates and invoice amounts. They had verified one hundred and two claims. The remaining three hundred and thirty-five claims sat in digital folders, each a scanned PDF with a cover letter in English or Hindi, supporting documents in varying orders, and often a WhatsApp chat with the credit manager offering "additional evidence" that was neither consistent nor clearly relevant.

Ananya said, to no one in particular: "If I call all of them, I lose the schedule. If I approve them as stated, I lose the audit trail. I'm checking the Insolvency Code again."

Section 7 of the IBC grants the IP the authority to investigate and adjudicate claims. It does not grant an extension.

She had approved four hundred and thirty-seven claims and was three days into a fourteen-day window. The second creditor meeting was locked in. The NCLT would not extend the statutory date. If she missed the schedule, she would have to ask for an extension, and extensions are not automatic — they require a court petition and, in practice, they signal that the IP has lost control of the case.

🌗 What changed

On the morning of May 12th, Ananya's nephew — a data engineer at a Delhi AI startup — visited for breakfast before heading to his office in Noida. Over chai and toast, Ananya mentioned, abstractly, that a large verification task had become unmanageable. Her nephew asked which bank the company used. State Bank, she said. Which creditor documents were missing? Proof that payments had actually been received. Which state governments were involved? Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu.

Three hours later, he sent her a Telegram link to the agent.

The agent was loaded on an old HP Elitebook in the office by 11 a.m. Ananya opened the claim spreadsheet — four hundred and thirty-seven rows, one for each creditor, with columns for: Creditor Name, Business Address, Claim Amount (as stated), Type of Goods/Services, Invoice Dates, Supporting Documents Attached (Y/N), Bank Confirmation Received (Y/N), Verification Status. She typed, into the agent, in Hindi:

"मेरे पास 437 claims हैं — vendors, job-shops, suppliers across Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu। मेरे पास debtor company के SBI statements हैं। मेरे पास 847 supporting documents हैं — PDFs में, scanned invoices, delivery challan, WhatsApp chats। मुझे यह verify करना है कि कौन से payments bank statements में हैं, कौन से invoices match करते हैं, और कौन सी delivery documentation गायब है। मुझे एक verify किया हुआ claims list चाहिए — marked: VERIFIED, PARTIAL, या DISPUTED। तीन दिन में 437 claims check करने हैं।"

(I have 437 claims — vendors, job-shops, suppliers across Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu. I have the debtor company's SBI bank statements. I have 847 supporting documents — PDFs, scanned invoices, delivery challan, WhatsApp chats. I need to verify which payments appear in bank statements, which invoices match, and which delivery documentation is missing. I need a verified claims list — marked VERIFIED, PARTIAL, or DISPUTED. I have three days to check 437 claims.)

The agent took the SBI statement first — she uploaded the Excel export of six months of bank transactions. Then, one by one, she uploaded the supporting documents: a folder of 437 invoices, a folder of delivery chalan scans, a folder of vendor affidavits that had been submitted with claims, and the company's accounts-payable aging schedule from the last three months before insolvency.

The agent worked through the night. It cross-referenced each bank payment against the list of creditors filing claims. When the bank showed a ₹15-lakh payment on February 18th to "M/s Rajesh Plastics, Bhiwadi", the agent checked whether any creditor named Rajesh or Rajesh Plastics had filed a claim, whether the claim amount was close to ₹15 lakhs, and whether any supporting document referenced February 18th. When the amount matched and documentation existed, it flagged the claim as VERIFIED. When the amount was close but a delivery document was missing, it flagged the claim as PARTIAL — and noted which document to request. When a vendor had filed a claim for an amount that did not appear in the bank statement at all, it flagged the claim as DISPUTED — and queued it for Ananya to investigate.

By 6 a.m. on May 13th, the agent had processed all four hundred and thirty-seven claims. The report it produced had four columns:

Status	Count	Notes
VERIFIED — payment in bank statement, invoice + delivery documentation present	287	Ready for claims register. Total amount: ₹97.4 crore
PARTIAL — payment in bank statement, one supporting document missing or unclear	103	Request additional evidence; likely valid. Total amount: ₹52.1 crore
DISPUTED — claim amount does not match bank statement; or no bank payment found	47	Require creditor follow-up or adjudication hearing. Total amount: ₹18.2 crore

The agent had also flagged something Ananya had not expected: three claims from the company's accounts-payable aging list that did NOT appear in the proofs of claim filed by creditors. These were vendors the company owed money to, but who had not yet filed claims by the May 2nd deadline. The agent recommended sending notices to those vendors — they had thirty days after the notification date to file claims, and the notices would ensure they did not unknowingly miss their rights.

Ananya called a meeting with Priya at 8 a.m. They spent the morning validating the agent's classifications by spot-checking fifty claims across the VERIFIED and PARTIAL buckets. In every case, the agent's categorization matched Ananya's independent analysis. By noon, they were confident.

"यह problem statement सही है। ये categorization सही है। अगर यह सही है, तो मैं claims register आज submit कर सकती हूँ।"

(The problem analysis is right. The categorization is right. If this is right, I can submit the claims register today.)

She did. By 3 p.m. on May 13th, Ananya had filed the claims register with the NCLT — marked with the agent's categorization: two hundred and eighty-seven verified, one hundred and three partial-pending-clarification, and forty-seven disputed. She had sent notice letters to the three missing vendors. She had scheduled the second creditor meeting for May 25th, and had notified all four hundred and thirty-seven creditors of their claim status.

⏰

Old process

35–42 days

Manual cross-reference of each claim against bank statements and supporting documents. Priya spends two weeks on the phone. Ananya personally spot-checks 20% of claims. Risk of claims being missed or incorrectly categorized.

🚀

Agent-assisted process

3 days

Agent processes all 437 claims in 6 hours. Ananya and Priya validate 50 spot-checks. All claims categorized (VERIFIED/PARTIAL/DISPUTED), with specific notes for follow-up. All three missing vendors identified and notified.

📊

Outcomes

100% claim visibility

Verified claims register filed 29 days early. Creditor meeting scheduled on time. Zero claims rejected on procedural grounds. NCLT case on schedule for 180-day completion. Future audit trail clear.

🧭 Why we built it

The Insolvency Professional market in India is, as of May 2026, approximately 1,800 registered IPs managing 2,400+ active cases across the Indian courts. The average case is a mid-market company, but the complexity of claim verification — particularly in cases involving multiple states, complex collateral, and vendor fragmentation — is the most common bottleneck. IPs report losing an average of thirty to forty days per case to claim verification. For a 180-day statutory timeline, this is material.

The problem is systematic. A large insolvency like Ananya's is not unusual. What is unusual is having an agent that can:

1. Ingest heterogeneous documents — bank statements in Excel, invoices as scanned PDFs, WhatsApp conversations as images, statutory affidavits in printed scan, delivery chalan in various vendor formats
2. Cross-reference across state and vendor jurisdictions — match a vendor in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan filing a claim with a ₹15-lakh payment in a Delhi company's SBI statement, even if the vendor name is abbreviated differently
3. Flag missing documents — know that a "PARTIAL" claim is only missing a delivery document, not an invoice, and specifically which vendor needs to be contacted
4. Produce an audit trail — show exactly which bank payment, invoice, and delivery evidence led to each categorization, so if a creditor later disputes the DISPUTED classification, Ananya can produce the matching logic

The IBC is thirty-nine years old (as of 2026, India's insolvency law). The NCLT has been adjudicating cases since 2016 — a decade of institutional knowledge about what claim disputes are material, which vendor groups are likely to be fragmented across states, and which documents matter for which type of claim. But that knowledge is in the heads of experienced IPs like Ananya. A junior IP or a newly qualified CA doing their first insolvency case would lose the thirty-to-forty-day window even with the agent's help.

Why the agent matters is not that it solves an impossible problem. It is that it solves a common problem fast enough that the IP can focus on the work that actually requires judgment: understanding why a vendor's claim does not match the bank statement, interviewing the debtor's finance team about missing documentation, and deciding whether a disputed claim is a good-faith dispute or an attempt to overstate a liability. The agent gives back the thirty days. What Ananya does with those days — reviewing the resolution plan, interviewing potential acquirers, stress-testing the company's collateral against the creditor waterfall — determines whether the insolvency resolves or liquidates efficiently.

What it does

• 🔍Cross-references each claim against bank statements, invoices, and delivery documentation to categorize the claim as VERIFIED, PARTIAL, or DISPUTED.
• 🗂️Identifies missing documents and flags which specific evidence (invoice, delivery challan, bank confirmation) is needed to move a PARTIAL claim to VERIFIED.
• 📞Surfaces vendors listed in accounts payable but not among the proofs-of-claim filed, and alerts the IP to send them reminder notices.

What it does not do

• 🔒Never submits a claim status or disputed-claim adjudication to the NCLT without Ananya's review and signature. Ananya remains the sole authorized person to file with the tribunal.
• 💳Never overrules Ananya's judgment. If Ananya believes a VERIFIED claim is actually suspicious, she can manually override the categorization with her reasons in writing.
• ✅Never decides that a disputed claim should be rejected. It flags disputes; Ananya schedules a hearing with the creditor and makes the adjudication.

🌱 What we hope happens

Ananya submitted the claims register on May 13th. The second creditor meeting was held on May 25th. The meeting was efficient — of the 287 verified claims, only two creditors asked questions about categorization. Both were resolved in ten minutes with reference to the bank statement and delivery documentation. Of the 103 partial-pending claims, 97 were moved to VERIFIED when the creditors produced the missing documents (most were delivery chalan that the vendors had filed separately as email attachments in the weeks after the initial claim submission). Six remained partial, pending clarification from the debtor company's finance team. Of the 47 disputed claims, the meeting approved opening adjudication hearings for twelve of them; the remaining thirty-five were withdrawn by creditors when Ananya walked them through the bank-statement cross-reference showing that payment had not been made.

The approved claims register was filed on May 26th.

What we hope happens is less dramatic than it sounds. Ananya is now in week two of the insolvency resolution process, interviewing potential resolution applicants. The resolution window is the ninety days following creditor approval — ninety days to find a buyer or a financial investor who will either acquire the company as a going concern or restructure and refinance it. The creditor value — ₹149.2 crore in approved claims — is now known with precision. The resolution applicants can price their offers accordingly. The process has texture and clarity instead of uncertainty.

The most important thing that happened is what did not happen: no claims were rejected on procedure. In a badly-managed insolvency, procedural failures — missing documentation, incorrect claim categorizations, creditors missing the filing deadline — can cause valid claims to be forfeited. In Ananya's case, one vendor who had not filed a claim by May 2nd received a reminder notice from the agent and filed by May 27th. Three days late, but the reminder gave them their statutory right back.

Later in June, when Ananya testifies to the NCLT about why she approved or disputed claims, she will not say "I checked the documents myself over many weeks." She will say: "The agent cross-referenced 437 claims against the debtor's bank statements and supporting documents. I validated the methodology by spot-checking 50 claims independently. I found no discrepancies. I rely on the agent's categorization as my professional opinion."

This is the kind of testimony that stands up to appellate challenge. The NCLT judges know the verification problem. They know that IPs are overloaded. They understand that an agent that processes claims systematically — with documented logic, spot-checked by the IP, and producing an audit trail — is more reliable than an IP doing it manually in three weeks under deadline pressure.

When the insolvency resolves — a resolution plan is approved, or the company is sold, or it goes into liquidation with a clear creditor waterfall — what Ananya hopes is that the thirty days she gained with the agent went to something that mattered. A resolution plan that was better scrutinized. An acquirer who was better vetted. A creditor class that was fairly treated because their claims were verified, not guessed at.

The insolvency code runs 180 days. In the old process, Ananya would have spent 40 of those days on verification, leaving 140 for the work that determines whether an insolvency succeeds or fails. The agent gives back the 40 days. She is using them to read acquisition bids more carefully, to interview the company's supply-chain manager about why the Tier-1 customer went insolvent, and to model the cash recovery scenarios for three different resolution applicants.

That is what we built it for. Not to replace the Insolvency Professional — the IBC did not create IPs so that companies could fail faster and more efficiently. It created IPs so that failed companies could be saved when possible, and when they cannot be saved, so their creditors could be treated with clarity and finality. The agent gives Ananya back the forty days that verification used to consume, so she can spend them on work that actually creates value.

And Ananya — methodical, patient, having spent years reading fine print in three countries, having seen what happens to creditors when the paperwork is messy — knows exactly what to do with forty days.