Cure rate
Cure rate is the share of delinquent contracts that fully cleared their arrears over a period and returned to the normal payment schedule.
How it is calculated
Take a delinquency bucket at the start of a period and see how many of its contracts are “clean” by the end of it, with no overdue amount left.
The formula: the number of contracts that left delinquency, divided by the number of contracts in the bucket at the start of the period.
An illustrative example: the 1–30 day bucket held 800 contracts, and a month later 480 of them had fully paid off their arrears. The cure rate is 60%.
Why it matters
Cure rate shows the quality of early-stage work. A partial payment reduces the debt but does not put the client back on schedule. A cure means the client is paying according to plan again, and future instalments will arrive without any collection effort.
Together with roll rate it gives the full picture of a bucket: what share cured, what share slipped deeper and what share stayed where it was.
What to do
Calculate the cure rate separately for each bucket. The deeper the delinquency, the lower the figure, and that is expected. Compare like with like, the same bucket across months and teams.
Watch for re-defaults. If a client cures and falls back into arrears a month later, the problem was postponed, not solved. It helps to track what share of cured accounts stays on schedule for at least two or three months.
A common mistake is to count a cure on the basis of a promise rather than an actual payment. A promise is a step, not a result.
More in Signals
- Sales team motivation: what to pay for when sales happen in chatSales motivation works when the variable pay is tied to money actually paid, not to activity: message counts and time online are easy to inflate. You need a clear formula, a fair way of assigning clients and every rep seeing their own results. Non-cash motivation in chat means recognizing specific conversations, not saying generic words.
- What a messenger sales team really costs and where it loses moneyA sales team in messengers costs more than salaries: money also leaks out through seven channels. These are slow replies, abandoned conversations, forgotten follow-ups, a sales rep leaving with the client base, blocked numbers, broadcasts with no result and broken payment promises. Each leak can be sized on your own numbers: lost conversations times your close rate times your average deal.