Read the 90+ bucket first. At the median US company, 87.92 percent of accounts receivable is current and only 0.40 percent is more than 91 days past due (Credit Research Foundation, National Summary of Domestic Trade Receivables, Q2 2026). If your 90+ column is materially above that, the problem is not invoicing. It is collections, and it is already costing you money.
An accounts receivable aging report lists every open invoice and sorts it by how long it has been outstanding, usually in 30-day bands. That part is mechanical. The useful part is what you do in the next hour after you open it, and most teams never get there because they read the report as a total rather than as a work queue.
This page is written for the person who owns the number: a founder, controller or finance lead at a company that is growing faster than its collections process. It covers which bucket carries the signal, what a defensible benchmark looks like, the concentration trap that quietly distorts every bucket total, how to convert the report into a weekly cadence, and how all of it ties back to days sales outstanding.
The AR aging report template is ungated. No form, no email, no download wall. It has an invoice-level input sheet, automatic bucketing by days overdue, and a summary by customer. Download it, paste your open invoices, and read along with your own numbers.
Read the report in this order
Most aging reports are opened top-left and read across. That is the wrong order. The information density runs right to left and customer-first, not bucket-first.
- Open the summary by customer, not the bucket totals. You are looking for names, not dollars.
- Scan the 90+ column. Anything sitting there is a decision, not a follow-up.
- Check the 61-90 column for invoices about to age into 90+ this month.
- Only then look at the bucket totals, to see whether the shape has moved since last month.
- Ignore 0-30 unless a single invoice in it is large enough to change your cash position.
One naming note, because it trips people up when they compare two systems. Some reports separate a Current column from a 0 to 30 days past due column, so "0-30" means zero to thirty days late rather than zero to thirty days since invoice date. Bill.com's own explainer describes exactly this convention, with columns for Current, 0 to 30, 31 to 60, 61 to 90 and 91+ days past due. Confirm which convention your system uses before you benchmark anything, or you will compare a current balance against a past-due one.
Which bucket actually matters
The 0-30 bucket is noise. Some overdue balance is the normal state of a US B2B business: Atradius reports that 43 percent of US credit-based B2B sales are overdue, with bad debts running at 5 percent of long overdue invoices (Atradius, Payment Practices Barometer, North America 2025). Canada was 44 percent and Mexico 41 percent in the same study. If you treat the existence of overdue invoices as the alarm, the alarm never stops.
The 90+ bucket is different, because collectability decays with age and the decay is steep. Commercial Collection Agencies of America publishes collectability by delinquency period, measured from the invoice due date, and the Credit Research Foundation republishes it.
| Months past due | Collectability | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| 1 month | 88.7% | Almost fully recoverable. A reminder is enough. |
| 3 months | 68.9% | Nearly a third of the invoice is already at risk. Escalate before it ages again. |
| 6 months | 51.3% | Coin flip. Escalation, not reminders. |
| 9 months | 37.5% | Assume partial recovery at best. |
| 12 months | 21.4% | Decide: settle, escalate, or write off. |
| 18 months | 15.2% | Reserve it and stop spending time on it. |
| 24 months | 8.9% | Effectively a bad debt. |
Read that table as a cost of delay. Expected recovery falls about 10 points a month through the first quarter, then about 6 points a month out to six months. That is why a growing 61-90 column matters more than a large 0-30 column. It is a forecast of next quarter's write-offs.
What a healthy distribution looks like
There is no credible public benchmark for a full four-bucket split, and anyone who hands you an "80/10/5/5 is healthy" table made it up. What does exist is the CRF national summary, which publishes the two figures that bracket the distribution.
| Metric | Median, Q2 2026 | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Percent Current | 87.92 | Your headline health number. Materially below this and the aging report is your top finance priority. |
| Percent Over 91 Days Past Due | 0.40 | A ceiling, not a target. Anything above about 1 percent deserves a named owner per invoice. |
| Days Sales Outstanding | 37.50 | The outcome measure. Aging tells you who; DSO tells you how badly. |
| Best Possible DSO | 34.00 | What DSO would be if nothing were past due. |
| Collection Effectiveness Index | 79.35 | Whether the cadence is working, not whether the balance is big. |
Two caveats before you benchmark against these. First, the CRF figures are a cross-industry median, and your terms may be materially different from the median respondent's. Second, the more useful comparison is against your own stated terms. If you sell on net 30 and a third of your balance is past 30 days, the industry median is irrelevant. You are not collecting on the terms you agreed.
So run two reads. Against the outside benchmark, roughly 88 percent current and well under 1 percent past 91 days. Against yourself, the share of balance that is past your own contractual due date, tracked month over month. The trend line matters more than the level.
The concentration trap
Bucket totals are dollar-weighted. One invoice can move the whole distribution while the number of late customers behind it stays at one. A $180,000 invoice landing in 61-90 makes the report look like a collections crisis when it is a single conversation with a single customer, possibly about a disputed line item rather than about cash.
The reverse error is more dangerous. A clean-looking 90+ total of $12,000 can be forty small invoices from forty customers, which is a process failure spread across your whole book. The first case is a phone call. The second case is a broken billing or dunning process. The bucket total cannot tell them apart.
There is no public benchmark for receivables concentration, so do not anchor on an invented threshold like "no customer above 15 percent of AR." Anchor on the materiality instinct that accounting already uses. Under ASC 280-10-50-42, revenues from a single external customer at 10 percent or more of a public entity's revenues must be disclosed. If one customer at a tenth of revenue is material enough for GAAP, one invoice dominating a bucket is material enough to be read by name.
The practical fix is ordering. Read the summary-by-customer view before the bucket view, every time. In the template, that is the summary sheet, and it exists precisely so the bucket totals are the second thing you see rather than the first.
From report to cadence
An aging report read once a month is a history lesson. Its actual job is to assign a next action, per customer, per week. The buckets are useful because they map cleanly to escalation levels, and escalation levels are what get invoices paid before collectability decays.
| Bucket | Default action | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| 0-30 | No action unless the invoice is large enough to matter to the cash forecast. | Automated reminder |
| 31-60 | Named email to the AP contact, with the invoice and PO attached. | AR owner |
| 61-90 | Call, not email. Confirm the invoice is in their system and approved for payment. | AR owner |
| 90+ | Escalate to the commercial relationship owner. Agree a payment plan or stop work. | Founder or account lead |
| Disputed, any age | Pull out of the cadence entirely and route to whoever can resolve the dispute. | Delivery or account lead |
The disputed row is the one most teams miss. A disputed invoice sitting in 61-90 is not a collections problem, and chasing it damages the relationship. Track disputes wherever you already track them and pull those invoices out before you work the list, so the cadence only touches invoices that are genuinely just late.
Where this sits in your month: the aging read belongs in the close, not after it. Add it to your month-end close checklist as a step with an output, which is the list of named actions for the coming weeks, not just a printed report. If you run professional services, the collections dashboard does the same job continuously.
Checking that the cadence works
DSO tells you the outcome but reacts slowly and moves with revenue mix. Collection Effectiveness Index is the better cadence metric because it measures how much of what was collectable you actually collected. Over a one-month period the Credit Research Foundation defines it as ((beginning receivables + credit sales - ending total receivables) / (beginning receivables + credit sales - ending current receivables)) x 100. The closer to 100 percent, the more effective the collection effort.
The CRF median CEI for Q2 2026 is 79.35. Use it as a floor. If you introduce a weekly cadence and CEI does not move within two months, the cadence is not being run, or it is being run against invoices that were never going to pay.
How aging explains DSO
The cleanest way to connect the two reports: median DSO is 37.50 days and median Best Possible DSO is 34.00 days. Best Possible DSO is what DSO would be if every open invoice were current. The 3.5-day gap between them is what the Credit Research Foundation calls average days delinquent, the average number of days your invoices run past due. Your aging buckets are where those days are sitting.
So the two reports answer different questions and neither substitutes for the other. DSO answers how much working capital your terms and your collections are consuming, which flows straight into working capital and cash planning. Aging answers which customers to call this week. If you only track DSO, you know you have a problem but not whose it is.
If the split between what you owe and what you are owed is the part you are still untangling, start with accounts payable vs receivable, then come back to the buckets.
About the template
The AR aging report template is free and ungated. There is no form in front of it and no email capture behind it. Three things are in it: an invoice-level input sheet, automatic bucketing by days overdue, and a summary by customer.
That is deliberately all. An aging template does not need to be clever. It needs to let you paste an export from your accounting system, see the customer view before the bucket view, and get to a list of names you can work through. If your accounting system already produces a usable aging report, use that. The template is for the case where it does not, or where you want the customer summary in front of the buckets.
Where Zinance fits
Zinance runs outsourced bookkeeping, tax, R&D credits and fractional CFO support for US companies. On receivables specifically, our AR and AP service owns the cadence described above: the weekly pass through the aging report, the escalation by bucket, disputes routed out of the collections queue, and CEI tracked month over month so you can see whether the cadence is working.
If the aging report is a symptom of a slower close rather than a collections gap, bookkeeping is the place to start, because you cannot chase invoices from a ledger that closes three weeks late. If the question is how much working capital your terms are consuming, that is a fractional CFO conversation.
Take the template first. If you want someone to run the cadence rather than build it, book a call and bring your current aging report to it.