Debt collection — the cards nobody owns

1,546 cards in the debt GHL have nobody's name on them, and they are 1,359 separate accounts — 187 of the cards are somebody already in the pile, queued a second time. Everything below counts accounts, because counting cards would bill the same debt twice. Crossed against the Debtor Ledger, 446 of them have already settled — 350 paid the balance off in full ($639,594 collected), 89 were zeroed by a reduction or write-down ($104,691 given away), and 7 were never financed at all. Those close today.

The remaining 911 owe $1,373,754. They are not one pile. 568 of them ($758,133) have texted back at least once — that is the list worth putting a collector's name against. The other 323 ($580,078) have never once replied to anything we have sent, so handing them over is handing over a phone book; they stay with the automation. A further 20 already sit on somebody's board under a second card — those get merged, not reassigned, or two collectors text the same person on the same afternoon.

The Unassigned board itself is one day old. All 55 of its cards were created on 2026-08-27, inside a single hour — it is a sweep somebody ran, not a backlog that built up there. Card age on that board means nothing; the account age underneath it does.

Card counts, so an account queued on two boards appears on both. The owed column only counts each account once, on whichever card is its live one.

The one that should not need saying: 446 people who have finished paying were sitting in a collections queue. 403 of them are on a Collected board, so those are filed correctly and merely ownerless — but 43 are sitting in a live queue. And it runs the other way too: 8 cards filed as collected still owe $8,790. Whatever writes to those boards is not reading the ledger.

Days since the 568 redistributable people last texted us.

Levelling gives the next card to whoever holds the fewest, so the desks finish as close to even as the pile allows — on today's caseloads that means the whole pile lands on the three lightest desks and they still end below everybody else. Even gives everyone the same number and leaves the existing imbalance exactly where it is. Biggest balances go out first either way. Sanity-check the names before acting on either: caseload is what /debt-workload counted, it does not know who is off, part-time, or working another queue.

A card's company name in this GHL is the order reference — the update business name from reference code step writes it there. That reference is the join to the Debtor Ledger, and it matches for 1,357 of the 1,359 accounts. Paid up means the ledger balance is under $10 — thousands of ledger rows carry paid in full alongside a residual balance, and every one of them is under $10, so a cent-exact test would call people who owe nothing. Replies come from the debt SMS cache, deduped to the last record per conversation; reading it line by line counts each thread several times and doubles every number. Ledger read 2026-09-17 10:32, cards pulled 2026-09-17 11:11 UTC.