Days Beyond Terms (DBT)
The average number of days a business pays its invoices past the agreed due date, weighted across reported trade experiences.
Days beyond terms measures lateness relative to the promise, not the invoice date. A company on net-30 terms that pays on day 42 is 12 days beyond terms. Bureaus — Experian and Creditsafe use DBT as a headline metric — compute it as a dollar-weighted average across all trade experiences reported for the business, which makes it a more intuitive cousin of scaled scores like PAYDEX: DBT of 0 means on-time on average; DBT of 15 means half a month late on average.
DBT is most powerful as a trend and a comparison. A stable DBT of 8 in an industry that averages 10 is unremarkable; a DBT that moves from 5 to 12 to 19 over three quarters is a company sliding toward a cash crisis, whatever its financial statements say. Compare industry-adjusted: construction and healthcare routinely run higher DBT than food distribution, so bureaus often present DBT against an industry benchmark.
Remember the denominator problem: DBT reflects only suppliers who report. Small samples produce volatile numbers — one disputed invoice at a single reporting vendor can spike the DBT of a business with three trade lines. Check the count and dollar volume of experiences behind the number before acting on it, and reconcile against your own ledger: your account-level DBT for the customer is the one number you can fully trust.
Formula
DBT = Dollar-weighted average of (Payment Date - Due Date) across reported trade experiences, in days
Worked example
A customer shows DBT of 17 against an industry average of 9, based on 22 trade lines. Six months ago its DBT was 6. The deterioration, not the level, is the signal — time to reduce exposure or tighten terms.
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