The Late & The Slow Payment Watchlist
Spring 2024

In February 2023, Good Business Pays published the first version of our Late & Slow Watchlist to provide a list of companies who are reporting the worst payment performance figures as part of the Government’s Payment Practices & Performance Regulations.

At that time, we committed to providing an updated list every six months. Why six months? Because the regulations state that large companies must report their payment times every six months. In this way we can track over time who are the serial late payers and indeed the serial fast payers.

We feel it is important to make this information available for anyone to see and have been delighted that a growing number of large companies are responding to calls for improvement and making big and positive changes to their payment performance. Please check our Achievements page to find out more.

Analysing data from every company that reported payment performance between 1 March 2023 and 1 January 2024, Good Business Pays identified:

• The Late Payers: Who report paying more than 50% of their invoices later than agreed terms and report taking more than 50 days to pay their invoices.
• The Slow Payers: Who report an average time to pay of more than 80 days.
• Serial Late Payers: Who have reported late payment every year since reporting began in 2018 demonstrating the culture of late and slow payment is engrained. 

Key Insights:

• Since our last Watchlist Report in August 2023, we have seen a small drop in the number of companies reporting average payment times over 100 days (33 to 26)
• More than half of those paying on average more than 100 days are in Manufacturing.
• However, since August 2023 there has been a 20% increase in companies reporting average payment times over 80 days, with the largest increase being in companies reporting payment between 80-90 days.
• Calling out poor payment performance leads to a positive effect. Since we identified the 110 serial late paying companies (in August 2023), 19 of those named companies have made big improvements to their long-standing poor payment culture and no longer appear on our list of serial late payers.

Companies Who Are Slow Payers

We define ‘Slow Payers’ as the companies who report an average time to pay of more than 80 days.

Each column can be sorted by clicking on the column title.

Companies Who Are Late Payers

We define ‘Late Payers’ as the companies who report paying more than 50% of their invoices later than agreed terms and report taking more than 50 days to pay their invoices.

Each column can be sorted by clicking on the column title.

The Serial Late Payers

We define serial late payers as the companies who have reported late payment every year since reporting began in 2018, demonstrating the culture of late and slow payment appears to be engrained.

Each column can be sorted by clicking on the column title.