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 writes that AR over 90 days should be less than 10% of total AR; in our experience, once you cross 15–20% the 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, with more old AR than new, your revenue cycle has structural problems that will not fix themselves.
What good looks like
HFMA's published targets: AR over 90 days under 10% of total AR, self-pay AR over 90 days under 30%, and days in AR ideally between 30 and 40. The 70%+ of dollars in the 0–30 day bucket that we look for is our own rule of thumb, not a published figure. 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.
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Founder of Sorso and a CFA charterholder. Before Sorso, Stan spent 19 years in corporate finance at institutions including UniCredit and Société Générale — managing a $450M loan portfolio and making senior partner at a major mezzanine lender by 29 — then built a fractional CFO firm exclusively for outpatient healthcare clinics.
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