Accounts receivable

Accounts receivable is everything the practice is owed for work it has already done: unpaid insurance claims, patient balances after insurance pays, and anything sitting on a payment plan. It is real revenue on paper that has not become real cash yet, which is exactly the gap between production and collections that a healthy practice keeps small.

A little AR is normal and unavoidable: insurance takes a few weeks to pay even a clean claim. The problem is AR that grows month over month without anyone actively working it down, because uncollected balances do not fix themselves; they either get paid because someone calls, or they quietly age past the point most practices ever recover them. That is why AR aging and days in AR exist as separate metrics: the total dollar figure alone does not tell you whether the money is two weeks old or two years old.

Someone on the team should own AR the same way someone owns the schedule: running the aging report weekly, working the oldest balances first, and flagging denied or pending claims before they fall out of timely-filing windows. A practice that never looks at this number is usually writing off far more than it realizes, just slowly and invisibly.