What is DCB (demand, collection, balance)?
What was due, what came in, what is left.
For a period: the demand raised, the collection received against it, and the closing balance outstanding. DCB is the oldest lending report there is and still the most revealing, because it puts the three numbers side by side instead of letting a growing book hide behind a single outstanding figure.
How is DCB calculated?
Opening arrears plus demand raised in the period, less collections in the period, gives closing arrears. Whether prepayments, foreclosures and arrears collected count as collection is a definition choice, and the definition has to travel with the number.
DCB: a worked example
Opening arrears ₹40 lakh, demand for the month ₹1.2 crore, collections ₹1.1 crore. Closing arrears are ₹50 lakh — the book collected 92% of the month's demand and still went backwards, which a headline collection percentage on its own would not have shown.
Why does DCB matter?
Almost every lender asking to diligence a book asks for DCB, because it exposes whether collections are keeping pace with demand. A portfolio total does not.
What a lending system has to do about DCB
Demand is generated from due events on the schedule rather than derived at report time, so what was demanded is a record rather than a recomputation — which is what makes a DCB for a past month answerable at all.
Related terms
- Collection efficiency — Collections as a percentage of what was due.
- DPD (days past due) — How many days an instalment has been overdue.
From the people who wrote this
Run your lending on Lenviq
The section above describes what a lending system has to do about this term. Lenviq does it — on every account, computed at day-end, with the direction it comes from recorded against it.
Lenviq is loan origination, servicing and accounting for NBFCs, built by FastLegal Technologies.