The Aging Report — Who to Chase First

Reading A/R aging buckets so you know which customers to call today, which to call this week, and which to write off. Triage logic, not just a column reference.

Updated 12 hours ago 3 views ar reports collections aging

The Aging Report — Who to Chase First

Every business with terms eventually has unpaid invoices. The aging report is not interesting because it tells you the total — your accounting software already does that. It's interesting because it tells you which invoices are unpaid and how stale each one is, so you can prioritize who to call this morning.

Most businesses lose more money to passive collections — invoices that quietly age into oblivion — than to outright bad debt. The aging report is the cure. It only works if you actually use it.

When you'd use this

  • First thing Monday morning, before you do anything else.
  • Before sending out statements of account at month-end.
  • When deciding whether to extend additional credit to a customer who's asking for more work.
  • Before the bookkeeper closes the month, to flag write-off candidates.
  • When you're trying to figure out whether a cash-flow problem is a sales problem or a collections problem.

If your aging report is full of lots of small old balances, you have a process problem. If it's full of a few big ones, you have a customer-relationship problem. The two require different fixes.

The buckets

The report sorts unpaid invoices into time buckets based on how long ago they became due:

  • Current — not yet due, or just hit due date. Customers are within terms.
  • 1–30 days — past due but recent. Most of these will pay with one nudge.
  • 31–60 days — actually a problem. Customer either has a dispute, has cash issues, or has lost the invoice.
  • 61–90 days — a real problem. Most invoices that age past 60 days take active collections work to recover.
  • 90+ days — bad-debt territory. Either pursue formally or write off.

The total dollar amount in each bucket is your at-a-glance health check. A healthy services business carries the vast majority of receivables in current and 1–30. If 31–60 starts getting fat, your collections cadence has slipped.

The aging report grouped by time bucket, showing each customer's overdue balance

How to triage — the actual playbook

Don't try to solve aging in a single afternoon. Work in priority order, and accept that you can't fix it all at once.

Triage order

  1. The big numbers in 31–60. This is your highest-leverage call. The customer hasn't paid, but the relationship is probably still good. A friendly phone call from the owner usually resolves these. Don't email — call.
  2. Anything in 61–90. Send a statement of account with a personal note. If they don't respond within a week, call. If they don't respond to the call, escalate to a final-notice letter with a deadline.
  3. The 90+ bucket. Make a write-off / pursue decision and stop equivocating. The longer this bucket lives, the more it warps your books and your A/R metrics. Either pursue with a collections agency or write it off and learn the lesson.
  4. Recurring offenders in 1–30. Some customers are perpetually 20 days late but always pay. Those don't need a call — they need a payment-method-on-file and an autopay arrangement. Convert them once and they leave aging forever.
  5. Current. Don't touch. They're inside terms.

Don't triage by total balance

A common error is sorting by "biggest unpaid balance" and chasing the largest customers first. That's wrong. A $5,000 invoice 15 days late is in good standing. A $400 invoice 75 days late is a problem. Always sort by bucket, then by amount within the bucket.

Don't be polite to the wrong people

Some customers respond to a polite email reminder. Most chronic late-payers do not. After two unsuccessful polite contacts, escalate the tone — not by being rude, but by being explicit. "Your account is now 67 days past due. I need this resolved by Friday or I'll need to pause new work." That kind of clarity gets paid; vague nudges don't.

Reading a real example

Suppose your aging shows a top-of-list customer with $2,400 in 1–30, $1,800 in 31–60, and $500 in 61–90 — total $4,700 owed.

  • The split is the story. The customer was current six months ago, slipped into 31–60 a couple of months ago, and now has a small but worrying tail in 61–90.
  • That pattern means deteriorating payment behavior, not a one-time slip. Get the owner on the phone before the 31–60 grows.
  • Don't wait for the 61–90 piece to age into 90+; address it now while you have leverage in the relationship.

Compare to a different customer with $4,000 all in current. Same total receivable, completely different conversation. The first needs a phone call this morning. The second needs nothing.

How often to run it

  • Daily for your first 90 days on Suprata, while you're still building trust in the data and the routine.
  • Weekly after that — pick a day (Monday morning works for most people), block out 30 minutes, run the report and work through the list.
  • Monthly before you send statements. Anyone past 30 days gets a statement; anyone current doesn't.

Common mistakes

  • Looking at the report without acting on it. This is the single biggest collections mistake. Pulling the report and sighing at it does nothing. Pull the report and make calls today.
  • Chasing biggest dollar amounts instead of oldest dollar amounts. Old debt gets written off; recent debt gets paid. Triage by age, not by balance.
  • Letting 90+ live forever. Every dollar in 90+ is a decision you haven't made. Make the decision: pursue or write off. The third option — "leave it on the books and pretend it'll come back" — is fiction.
  • Not converting chronic late-payers to autopay. If a customer is reliably 20 days late but always pays, the fix is a saved payment method, not another reminder. One conversion eliminates them from aging forever.
  • Treating disputed invoices as collections problems. They're not. They're disputes. Disputed invoices need resolution conversations, not collection calls. Flag them in your notes and route to whoever can actually answer the question.
  • Not pausing new work for accounts deep in arrears. Continuing to do work for a customer who's 75 days late is voluntarily increasing your exposure. Pause new orders until they're current — most will pay quickly when service stops.

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