An analyst whose risk-based receivables method cut overdue debt among Air Liquide healthcare clients by 25% while keeping strategic customers explains which signals separate a delay from a coming loss

The first half of 2026 brought 372 bankruptcy filings by large American companies, one more than a year earlier and the highest first-half total since 2010, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Industrials led with 50 filings, ahead of consumer discretionary (35) and healthcare (26), while Epiq AACER counted 1,663 Subchapter V filings by small businesses, up 50% year over year. For a supplier, a customer's filing turns an unpaid invoice into one claim among many — so the decision that protects receivables happens earlier, when a finance team decides whether a slow payer gets another delivery.

Valeriia Roibu built her practice around that decision. As a financial analyst at Air Liquide Russia, she assessed the credit risk of corporate clients, healthcare companies among them, and her assessments helped cut overdue receivables in that segment by 25%. She is completing a Master of Science in Accounting at the University of Central Florida. Her method begins where an automatic block ends: which late payer deserves patience.

A due date is not a diagnosis

A late payment by itself says little about the client behind it. One customer holds back money over a paperwork dispute, another because its cash is running out. The common safeguard treats them alike: once an invoice passes its due date, deliveries stop. A strategic customer loses its deliveries over a paperwork delay, while the company sliding toward a filing gets the same treatment — only after it has already run up the debt. One error costs a relationship; the other shows up in the overdue report.

Valeriia Roibu met that problem in 2022, when she joined the finance function of Air Liquide Russia with a degree in accounting and finance from the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation. Air Liquide, a producer of industrial and medical gases, serves 4.3 million customers and patients on revenue close to €27 billion in 2025. Her portfolio ran from Moscow-region accounts to foreign contracts. Rather than a single trigger, she read four signals together: the client's payment history, the size and age of the debt, the financial health of the client itself and its strategic value to the company. Only then did a recommendation go to management.

“Instead of an automatic block on deliveries, I wanted the company to have a choice,” recalls Valeriia Roibu, then a financial analyst at the company. “Depending on the case, the client kept getting product under tighter control, or shipments went on hold for a while. The third route was collection, and that one was for the cases where the first two no longer made sense.”

Read together, the first three signals answer what a due date cannot: one late invoice against a clean history and sound accounts is a delay, while a debt that grows and ages month after month as the client's own numbers weaken is a loss taking shape. The fourth signal decides how much patience the company can afford. Management used those assessments to set terms client by client, and where a debtor carried high risk but real commercial weight, the commercial team weighed in before any delivery decision. Within the healthcare segment, overdue receivables fell by a quarter.

“What the approach gave us was time,” she says. “Higher risk showed up while the client was still paying, so problem debt did not get a chance to pile up, and we did not lose the relationships that mattered strategically.”

What the verdict stands on

The judgment is only as good as the record behind it: a single wrong entry in the ERP system can make a delay look like a loss, or the reverse. Keeping that data accurate was part of her remit, and the same figures fed the company's reporting and budgets. She also took part in rolling out an updated accounting policy — the rulebook for how transactions get recorded.

Scored in Kazan

In April 2025 the approach brought her the title of Leader in Strategic Financial Risk Management at Business Leaders, a Russian national business competition whose final was held on April 12 in Kazan. Jurors, among them Viktor Lebedev, founder of the international company SPL, and Alexander Melnikov, owner of Melnikov Group with more than 400 franchises, scored finalists on innovation, market potential, business-model sustainability, teamwork and social significance. Under market potential, the organizers noted that assessment of this kind flags a likely late payer before a company agrees to defer payment, which makes the tools usable by any organization selling to corporate clients.

She has since moved to the United States and lives in Orlando, where the UCF program runs through December 2026. Since September 2025 she has belonged to the Epsilon Gamma Chapter of Beta Alpha Psi, the honors organization for accounting and finance students and professionals, and attends its workshops, networking events and presentations by accounting and audit firms. After graduation she plans to join a large public accounting firm in the United States, working in audit, internal controls and risk assessment while pursuing the CPA license.

With filings at levels last seen in 2010, more of that work will land on auditors and risk advisers deciding which receivables a company can still count on — the question her method was built to answer: which unpaid invoice is a delay, and which is the start of a loss. A supplier that can tell them apart before the filing keeps the good customer and gets ahead of the bad debt.

About the Author

Sowmiya Sri Mani is a prolific writer covering AI, Business, Technology, Markets, and Lifestyle. She loves turning complex subjects into something readers might enjoy and understand. For her, writing is about finding the interesting side of a subject and making it worth the reader’s time.