AR aging buckets
AR aging buckets — also called days in AR aging — categorize outstanding claims by how long they have been unpaid since the date of service or billing: 0–30 days, 31–60 days, 61–90 days, and 90+ days. The aging report shows you where your money is stuck and how long it has been sitting there. Days in AR (average collection period) is the summary number; AR aging is the distribution behind it.
Why this matters for your clinic
Claims over 90 days old are hard to collect. Some payers have timely filing deadlines that make them impossible to collect after a certain point. HFMA MAP Keys target aged AR over 90 days at under roughly 10% of total AR; once you cross 15–20%, your follow-up process is clearly broken. You are not working claims fast enough, and revenue is aging into uncollectable territory.
Your AR aging report is a diagnostic tool. A healthy practice has a pyramid shape: most dollars in 0-30 days, less in 31-60, even less in 61-90, and minimal in 90+. If your shape is inverted — more old AR than new — your revenue cycle has structural problems that will not fix themselves.
What good looks like
HFMA MAP Keys reference targets: aged AR greater than 90 days (as a percentage of total AR) under roughly 10% for high-performing organizations, and net days in AR in the 30–40 range. A healthy distribution has 70%+ of dollars sitting in the 0–30 day bucket. If your 90+ bucket is growing month over month, you have a follow-up problem that is getting worse, not better.
From Sorso
We've found that AR aging tells a truer story when segmented by payer — a single stalled payer can make the overall 90+ bucket look alarming while the rest of the book is perfectly healthy.
Founder of Sorso. 18 years in corporate finance. Managed a $450M loan portfolio before building a fractional CFO firm exclusively for healthcare clinics.
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