Lapse Ratio
Categories: Credit, Regulations
See: Lapse.
If you give credit to lots of buyers at your landscape nursery, and they buy almost everything on Net 30 credit, you'll track who is...late. That is, you'll track whose bills-due have lapsed into the "late" category, and you'll eventually carry some ratio, such that you know for, say, every 100 sales, 3 of them will lapse.
You might learn over time that 2 are eventually paid, albeit with late fees. And 1 sale just evaporates. That's your lapse ratio...that 3 per 100 figure. Your deadbeat ratio: that one-in-100 thing. And yes, it hurts.