How long a payment stays stopped
A stop has a mean, a median and a tail, and the tail is where most of the frustration lives. This page gives the three, separates the clock from the delay, and shows the 14 requests that sat past ninety days.
- weighted mean
- 8.7 d
- released median
- 6 d
- nine in ten
- 34 d
- past 90 days
- 14
- same day
- 1,421
- reversed mean
- 3.1 d
A stop lasts a weighted mean of 8.7 days across 380 sampled stops, but the median released request is back in six days, and nine requests in ten are paid or closed within 34 days. Fourteen sat past ninety days, which is 0.8% of all requests and 3.7% of the stopped ones.
Three numbers, three uses
The mean answers what the sample cost in total; the median answers what a typical request experiences; the ninetieth percentile answers what the worst ordinary case looks like. Reporting only the mean would make a stop look worse than it usually is, because the alleged-breach ground pulls it up, and reporting only the median would hide the tail entirely.
| ground | stops | mean days | days x stops |
|---|---|---|---|
| a document gap | 148 | 4.2 | 621.6 |
| a source-of-funds query | 96 | 11.6 | 1,113.6 |
| a rail or name mismatch | 61 | 6.8 | 414.8 |
| an alleged term breach | 49 | 22.4 | 1,097.6 |
| a dependency not settled | 26 | 2.1 | 54.6 |
| all stops | 380 | 8.7 | 3,302.2 |
The clock against the delay
The clock is the time the stop lasted; the delay is how much later the money arrived than it would have without the stop. They are equal only when the request would otherwise have been paid the same day. Because 1,421 of the sample were paid the same day, the base case is same-day, so for the 260 released requests the delay is the whole clock. For the 22 that were refused and then reversed on appeal, the delay runs from the request to the reversal, which is a mean 7.9 days rather than the 3.1 days the appeal itself took.
What the re-ask does to the clock
A stop that needs two items is not simply twice a stop that needs one: each item restarts the operator reading time. In the sample a released request needing one item closed in a mean 4.8 days and one needing four or more in a mean 12.4 days, so the last three items cost about three times as much time as the first one.
- Compare the stop against its ground, not against a general rule: 11.6 days is normal for a source-of-funds query and unusual for a document gap.
- Count the items you have supplied; each additional item restarts a reading time.
- Treat 34 days as the ordinary outer edge, because nine requests in ten closed inside it.
- Treat past 90 days as a tail event, present in 14 of 1,800 requests.
- Separate the clock from the delay by asking when the money would have arrived without the stop.