Colbourne
Colbourne Assurance Intelligence Group
Payment practices intelligence

Every large UK company must disclose how it pays its suppliers. Almost nobody reads it as a trend.

We structure the statutory Duty to Report on Payment Practices and Performance filings into league tables and time series — turning a twice-yearly compliance disclosure into an early-warning signal for supplier and counterparty risk.

The invisible, made visible — 14 consecutive statutory filings, 2019–2026
Amazon Digital UK Limited — average time to pay a supplier invoice
H2 2019H1 202645d144d
Average days to pay
45 → 144
H2 2019 to most recent filing (H1 2026)
Invoices paid 60+ days late
3% → 48%
share of invoices, same period
Source: statutory payment practices filings, gov.uk bulk export (fetched direct, 15 Aug 2026). All 14 filed periods plotted — no points omitted or interpolated.
18 consecutive statutory filings, 2017–2026 — the longest run in our sample
Ernst & Young (Asia-Pacific) Services Limited — average time to pay a supplier invoice
H2 2017H1 2026149d547d
Average days to pay
149 → 547
H2 2017 to most recent filing (H1 2026) — volatile throughout, not a smooth climb
Not paid within agreed terms
63–98%
range across all 18 periods — never once below 63%
Source: statutory payment practices filings, gov.uk bulk export (fetched direct, 15 Aug 2026). All 18 filed periods plotted — no points omitted or interpolated.

Why this exists

The data is free. The pattern in it isn't visible to anyone.

Large UK companies — above roughly £54m turnover, £27m balance sheet, or 250 staff — are legally required to publish how they pay suppliers, twice a year, or their directors carry criminal liability. Until now, that liability has been theoretical: the government confirmed in March 2026 that the body responsible for enforcement has never had the power to check compliance or issue fines. The filings are public. The government's own checker shows you one company's most recent snapshot. Nobody structures the history.

Trend, not snapshot

A single filing tells you almost nothing. Six years of filings tell you whether a counterparty's payment behaviour is stable, improving, or quietly deteriorating — often years before it shows up anywhere else.

Statutory, not opt-in

This is a mandated disclosure covering every qualifying company, not a voluntary trade-data-sharing network with participation gaps. What's filed is what the company itself told the government.

Compliance itself is a signal

Some companies stop filing altogether. A lapsed filing history, cross-checked properly, is its own early warning — separate from what the filings themselves say.

Beyond a single company

Every figure, ranked against the whole country — and against its own industry.

A number in isolation doesn't tell you much. 45 days sounds fine until you know the national median is 32. We rank every company two ways: against all reporting companies nationally, and against others in the same industry, using Companies House's own official SIC classifications. Below a minimum sample size, we say so rather than quote a percentile from a handful of companies.

Company (SIC 38110 — waste collection)
Avg. days to pay
Industry percentile
Smith's (Gloucester) Limited
59
97th
Mitie Waste & Environmental Services
54
93rd
Biffa Waste Services Limited
44
80th
FCC Environment Services (UK)
22
7th
A tight, well-behaved sector (30 reporting companies) makes the one real outlier easy to spot — that's the pattern this ranking is built to surface, in any industry with enough companies to compare fairly.

This is early. We want to know if it's useful before we build further.

We're validating demand, not selling a finished product. Tell us who you are and we'll get in touch to show you what the full dataset looks like for the companies you actually care about.

No pricing has been set. Early access is free while we validate the product. We won't share your details.