Collections departments love numbers: calls made, emails sent, accounts worked, promises to pay, dollars collected, delinquency percentage and charge-offs. Put enough of those numbers into a spreadsheet, add some red, yellow and green indicators and suddenly you have a collections dashboard.

But do you actually know whether your portfolio is getting healthier? That is a different question.

After more than two decades in collections, I have seen organizations place tremendous emphasis on metrics that are easy to count but provide surprisingly little information about actual risk. There is nothing inherently wrong with tracking activity. The problem begins when activity is mistaken for performance.

A collector making 75 calls in a day may be working extremely hard. A collector making 20 calls may be working extremely effectively. Without knowing what happened as a result of those calls, the number itself tells us very little.

Collections should ultimately be measured by movement. Did the account cure? Did the customer keep the promise? Did the balance move deeper into delinquency? Did we identify a deteriorating situation early enough to protect our position?

If the account ultimately defaults, what are we realistically going to lose? Those are the questions that tell us something about portfolio health. And in equipment finance, where collateral and recovery values add another dimension to risk, they matter even more.

ACTIVITY IS NOT PERFORMANCE
Call counts are probably the easiest example. For years, collections departments have used outbound calls as a productivity metric. It makes intuitive sense. Collectors collect by communicating with customers, so more attempts should, in theory, yield better results.

Except that is not necessarily how collections works.

Twenty well-prepared calls to the right customers can accomplish considerably more than 75 attempts made simply because someone is expected to hit a daily number. The same applies to emails, text messages and accounts worked.

Activity metrics have value. Managers need to know whether accounts are being worked and whether collectors are maintaining appropriate contact frequency. They can also identify workload problems or collectors who simply are not engaging their portfolios.

But activity should be viewed as an input, not an outcome. The question should never stop at, “How many calls did we make?” It should continue with, “What happened because we made them?”

A PROMISE IS ONLY AS GOOD AS THE PAYMENT
Promises to pay are another classic collections KPI. A collector obtains 15 promises to pay during the week. Another obtains eight. Who performed better? We cannot answer that question.

If four of the first collector’s 15 promises were actually kept while seven of the second collector’s eight were kept, the picture changes considerably. That is why the PTP kept rate is far more meaningful than simply counting promises.

Promises are useful operationally because they demonstrate engagement and indicate anticipated cash flow. But an unkept promise is not a collection.

In fact, repeated broken promises may be telling us something much more important about the account. They can signal deteriorating liquidity, unrealistic commitments from the customer or simply an attempt to buy time.

Tracking the percentage of promises actually kept transforms the metric from a measure of conversation into a measure of reliability.

DOLLARS COLLECTED CAN FOOL YOU, TOO
Surely dollars collected must be the ultimate metric? Not necessarily. Imagine two collectors. Collector A brings in $500,000 during the month. Collector B collects $250,000.

On the surface, Collector A appears to have doubled Collector B’s performance. But what if $400,000 of Collector A’s total came from a single large customer who would have paid anyway?

What if Collector B cured 15 troubled accounts, prevented several from rolling into later delinquency and negotiated payments on accounts that had previously been considered high risk?

Gross dollars collected provide useful information, but without context, they can reward portfolio composition as much as collector performance.

The same problem exists when comparing portfolios. A collector managing larger-ticket transactions will naturally have opportunities to collect larger dollar amounts than someone managing smaller-ticket accounts.

The better question is not simply how much money came in. It is how much risk came out.

WATCH WHERE THE DELINQUENCY IS MOVING
This is where cure rates and roll rates become particularly useful. A delinquency percentage provides a snapshot. Cure and roll rates provide movement.

Suppose a portfolio ended June at 2.1% delinquent and July at 2.0%. That sounds like improvement. But beneath that number, several accounts may have migrated from the 31-to-60-day bucket into the 61-to-90-day bucket, while a couple of larger early-stage accounts happened to cure.

The headline delinquency percentage improved. The remaining delinquency became more severe. That distinction matters.

Recent equipment finance commentary has made a similar observation. Industry conditions remain relatively healthy overall, but credit professionals have noted that stress can build beneath benign headline delinquency and loss rates. One equipment finance executive recently described early-stage delinquency as relatively stable while the “back end of the curve” was becoming heavier.

That is exactly why migration matters. How much of the 1-to-30-day population returned to current? How much rolled into 31-to-60? How much of 31-to-60 moved into 61-to-90? And perhaps most importantly, how much of the portfolio repeatedly cures only to become delinquent again?

A customer who goes 20 days past due every six months represents a different risk than one whose delinquency progresses steadily from 15 to 45 to 75 days. A static month-end number may treat both as delinquency. A trend tells you the story.

COUNT DOLLARS, NOT JUST ACCOUNTS
Another metric that can distort portfolio health is delinquent account count. Suppose Portfolio A has 10 delinquent customers and Portfolio B has three. Which portfolio concerns you more?

You still do not have enough information. If Portfolio A consists of 10 $20,000 transactions sitting 10 days past due while Portfolio B contains three transactions totaling $1.8 million sitting more than 75 days past due, the answer becomes obvious. Account counts are useful for understanding workload. They are much less useful for understanding exposure.

Collections reporting should therefore look at both number of delinquent accounts and dollars exposed, broken down by aging. Ten accounts may create more work. Three accounts may create far more risk.

EQUIPMENT FINANCE HAS ANOTHER NUMBER THAT MATTERS
This is where equipment finance separates itself from many other forms of commercial collections. We have collateral.

A $500,000 delinquent balance secured by equipment expected to recover $425,000 at liquidation is not the same risk as a $500,000 balance secured by highly specialized equipment expected to bring $125,000. Yet both appear on the delinquency report as $500,000.

That is why I believe one of the most valuable collection metrics in equipment finance is collateral adjusted exposure. Once an account reaches a meaningful stage of delinquency, we should begin asking:

• What is the current balance?
• What is the realistic orderly or liquidation value of the equipment?
• Where is the equipment?
• Can we recover it?
• What will recovery, transportation, storage, legal action and remarketing cost?
• What is our estimated deficiency after all of that?

Now we are measuring potential loss rather than simply delinquency.

That information also changes collections strategy. A severely delinquent account with strong collateral coverage may warrant a very different approach than one in which collateral values have collapsed and each additional month increases the expected deficiency.

THE BEST METRICS ARE FORWARD-LOOKING
There is an important distinction between reporting what happened and identifying what may happen next. Charge-offs tell us what we lost. Delinquency tells us what has already gone wrong. Neither necessarily tells us what is beginning to go wrong.

The equipment finance industry is currently experiencing an interesting version of this problem. ELFA’s June 2026 CapEx Finance Index reported an industry-wide delinquency rate at a multi-year low and losses remaining modest. At the same time, credit and collections professionals have cautioned that today’s portfolio performance may not fully reflect forward risk.

Both things can be true. That is why good collections reporting should include leading indicators where possible.

• Broken promises
• Repeated ACH returns
• Customers who continually require payment-date changes
• Increasing disputes
• Customers who suddenly stop responding
• Requests for extensions from historically strong payers
• Collateral that has moved or cannot be located

None of those individually guarantees a default. Together, however, they can tell you something a delinquency percentage cannot. They tell you where to look.

BUILD A DASHBOARD THAT ANSWERS THE RIGHT QUESTION
There is no single perfect collections KPI. Calls matter. Emails matter. Dollars collected matter. Delinquency percentages matter. Promises to pay matter. The mistake is expecting any one of them to tell the whole story.

A meaningful collections dashboard should combine activity, outcomes and portfolio risk. It should show whether accounts are curing or rolling, whether promises are being kept, how much dollar exposure sits in each aging category, where concentrations exist and what the likely loss looks like after collateral recovery.

Most importantly, it should show trends. Because the purpose of collections reporting should not be to prove that the collections department was busy last month. It should help the organization understand what is happening next.

After all, the ultimate goal of collections has never been to make calls, send emails or obtain promises. The goal is to mitigate risk, preserve relationships when possible and minimize loss when it is not. The best collections metrics measure exactly that. •

The Collector Chronicles by Ty Schwamberger is an exclusive series to Monitor that explores the challenges of business-to-business debt collections within the equipment finance industry. Ty Schwamberger has been involved in accounts receivable management within various industries for over 23 years. He is well-versed in the numerous collections and bankruptcy laws, believing that great listening and negotiation skills are at the forefront when dealing with those experiencing financial challenges.

Before joining Elevex Capital as head of collections in January 2025, he was the AVP of member solutions (collections) at a northeastern Ohio credit union. Schwamberger and his wife live in Brecksville, OH, with their two sons.