Should I maximise creditor days?

Stretching suppliers frees cash but can damage relationships and pricing. Balance it against early-payment discounts.

No — it's a free illustration. Your actual Creditcorp offer depends on an assessment of your company.

Creditor days (DPO) calculator — Calculators

How to use it

Enter your figures above — the result updates instantly and nothing leaves your browser. Creditor days (DPO) calculator results are illustrative and not a quote or credit decision.

How to interpret the result

A higher creditor days figure means the business is taking longer, on average, to pay its suppliers, which keeps cash in the company for longer. A lower figure means suppliers are being paid more quickly. Neither reading is automatically good or bad — it depends on why the number sits where it does and whether that matches how the business intends to operate.

It's most useful to look at the figure alongside supplier terms actually agreed, rather than in isolation. If the calculated days run well beyond the terms a business has negotiated, that gap is worth understanding — it could reflect deliberate cash management, or it could signal that payments are simply running later than intended. Tracking the figure over several periods, rather than as a single snapshot, shows whether the trend is stable, improving, or drifting in a direction that needs attention.

Limitations and good practice

This calculator gives a single blended average across all suppliers and purchases, so it can mask a lot of variation underneath. A business paying most suppliers promptly but running a handful of accounts very late will show a moderate overall figure that hides the concentrated risk in those late accounts. It's good practice to sit this estate-wide figure alongside a supplier-by-supplier view, particularly for the accounts that matter most to ongoing supply.

The result is also only as reliable as the two inputs. Trade payables can shift sharply around invoicing and payment-run dates, and annual cost of sales is often a year-end or estimated figure, so a single day's calculation is a snapshot rather than a precise measure. As with the debtor days (DSO) calculator, it works best read together with related working-capital measures, such as stock cover, rather than on its own.