Days Beyond Terms

Business Days Beyond Terms reported by Experian Business Information Services for the second quarter of 2011 show some interesting results.  Like the bankruptcy rates discussed in the last post, the most interesting being that the largest companies had the worst payment rates.

While the publicly released data doesn't give the actual numbers for company size, the full report does disclose figures for industry groups.  For company size, Days Beyond Terms is represented by categories of colors from tan (least bad) to dark red (worst).  I'll represent them with numbers from least bad (1) to worst (5).  For the period ending June 2011, the figures are as follows:

Company Size DBT

1 - 4 1

5 - 9 1

10 - 19 2

20 - 49 3

50 - 99 3

100 - 249 2

250 - 499 2

500 - 999 3

1,000+ 4

Frankly, I'm at a loss to explain this.  Like the discussion about bankruptcy rates, I'm not surprised that the larger companies are having difficulties, but what's different about them versus the small companies?  Anyone have an explanation for this?

Now let's look at industries.  I'll just summarize the top worst offending industries.  These may surprise some of you.

Industry Avg. DBT % $ Delinquent % $ 91+

Construction 12.1 22.8 17.4

Business Services   9.2 12.7   9.0

Finance   8.9 11.2   7.8

Agriculture   8.8 10.5   8.0

Communications   8.1 19.3  11.7