The last week of the month runs a third above normal. The 7th through the 9th run a quarter below. Friday beats Sunday by more than 100 points. Here is the send calendar.
Every collections floor has a send schedule, and most of them were set by whoever built the first campaign and never revisited. We took a random pull of payments set up through Resolvah portals and laid every one on the calendar: day of the month, day of the week, month of the year. The pattern is large, it is stable, and it does not look like most send schedules.
One note on method. Day-of-month figures are measured against the same weekday in the same calendar month, so paydays show through without the weekly cycle muddying them. Weekday and month figures are simple indexes against the average day.
The 28th through the 30th run 28% to 36% above normal. The 29th is the single busiest day of the month at +36%. The 7th through the 9th run 21% to 24% below. That is a 60-point swing inside every month, and it repeats every month.
Two things surprised us. The 1st and the 15th, the days everyone assumes are paydays, are ordinary: the 1st runs 7% below and the 15th 5% below. And the trough is wide. From the 4th through the 10th, every single day runs at least 12% below normal. The month does not really wake up until the 16th.
A Friday afternoon text is worth several Sunday ones. If your platform sends on a fixed cadence from the placement date, a third of your messages land on days when nobody is paying.
February runs 21% above the average month and March 16% above; the refund window is the single biggest seasonal lift in the year. Summer is solid (July and August both around +20%). Then the autumn goes soft: September is the quietest month at −28%, and October through December all run about 20% below. January, refund or not, runs −21%.
Portal logins cluster on Tuesday through Thursday between 4 and 8 pm in the consumer's local time; nine of the ten busiest weekday-hours fall in that window. The single highest slot for payments set up per hour is Friday 4 to 5 pm. Note the phrase "consumer's local time." A 9 am send from an Eastern office reaches a Phoenix consumer at 6 am.
Put together, here is what the data says a month should look like:
It is not a claim that the calendar causes payments. People get paid at the end of the month, so they pay at the end of the month; the calendar is a proxy for cash in hand. It is also not a reason to go quiet for three weeks. The soft days are exactly when a plain-language statement or a plan offer does its best work, because there is no ask attached. The point is to stop sending the same message on the 8th as on the 29th and expecting it to perform the same.
The full report, with every chart, the holiday table and the login heatmap, is at resolvah.com/reports/payment-calendar.
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