If you have time for only one check on a business partner, make it the account blockade. Nothing else in the public record speaks as directly to whether a company pays what it owes.

What enforced collection is

When a creditor holds an enforceable instrument and the debtor does not pay, collection runs through the National Bank of Serbia. The NBS instructs banks to block all of the debtor's dinar and foreign-currency accounts and to direct funds towards settling the debt. While a blockade runs, the company effectively cannot use its money.

What is public

The NBS keeps a public register of debtors in enforced collection, searchable by matični broj or PIB. For a company that is or has been blocked it shows:

  • name, address and town,
  • matični broj and PIB,
  • the total amount blocked,
  • every blockade period — from, to, and how many days,
  • the total number of days blocked.

The data covers five years back from the date of the query. The blocked amount is refreshed hourly, every working day between 9am and 5pm.

How to read it

The number of days matters more than the current state. A company blocked for seven days three years ago probably had an administrative problem. A company with three separate periods totalling five hundred days has a pattern. A company blocked continuously for more than a thousand days is not really trading, whatever the APR register still says about it being active.

That last point is why the blockade is worth checking separately from the status: the register status only changes once a procedure is opened, while a blockade is visible immediately. A long blockade is, in fact, one of the reasons a company ends up in forced liquidation.

What a blockade does not mean

A blockade is not proof of insolvency. A disputed claim, ongoing litigation or an error in the enforcement procedure will block an account too. That is why the period matters: a short blockade long ago is a data point, a long current one is a warning.

And the accounts themselves

The NBS also keeps a unified register of accounts, showing every open and closed dinar and foreign-currency account a company holds, the bank it is held with and the date it was opened. It refreshes every sixty minutes. It also happens to carry the PIB — which APR's open data does not publish at all.