“Sales growth for the month was helped by an extra billing day and it needed it because heating degree days were well below normal in five of our seven regions,” said HARDI Market Research & Benchmarking Analyst Brian Loftus. “The dollar weighted annual growth was also near five percent, so that looks like a fair assessment of the year versus the unusually strong 2018.”

The Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), a measure of how quickly customers pay their bills, is near 50 days.

“The DSO was a bit higher than the recent Decembers,” said Loftus. “This is the second consecutive month that the DSO has been about a day or more higher than the prior year.”

“The economy has been growing in the two percent area,” said Loftus. "The consensus expectation even before the coronavirus disruption, was for some modest easing of that pace in the new year.”

The latest HARDInomics quarterly indicates only a few states are experiencing a noticeably slower pace. The lack of excesses in the economy despite the duration of the expansion supports the soft-landing consensus expectation.

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