A/R days (days in accounts receivable)
A/R days, or days in accounts receivable, is the average number of days a practice takes to collect what it is owed. Divide the total A/R balance, what patients and insurance owe, by average daily production. Lower is better: money arrives sooner after care is delivered, and less of it ages into write-offs.
Also calledDays in A/RDays in accounts receivableAR days
By Dr. Maya Arnaout, DDS, VP of RevenuePublished 4 min read
How do you calculate A/R days?
Take what patients and insurance owe today and divide it by what the practice produces in an average day.
A/R balance
$96,000
What patients and insurance owe today
Average daily production
$6,000
$540,000 over the last 90 days, divided by 90
A/R days
16
Days, on average, to get paid
Use the same basis every time. A common choice is production over the last 90 days, which smooths out short months. Net production, after contractual write-offs, gives a truer picture than gross, and it is the basis ScoutIQ’s customer results use.
How do you read A/R days?
- Watch the trend, not one reading. A number that creeps up three weeks in a row says more than any single month.
- Split it by location. A group average can hide one office that is falling behind.
- Split insurance from patient A/R. They have different causes and different fixes.
- Read it with the aging buckets: 0 to 30, 31 to 60, 61 to 90 and over 90 days. Two practices with the same A/R days can carry very different amounts over 90.
- Check write-offs alongside it. A/R days can fall because balances were written off, not collected.
What drives A/R days up?
- Payments posted days or weeks after the money arrived, so the ledger still shows them as owed.
- Denials nobody works, sitting in A/R until they age out.
- Patient balances with no follow-up after the first statement.
- Claims sent late or with missing information.
- Unapplied credits, and payments posted to the wrong patient.
Several of these are posting problems, not collection problems. Fixing insurance payment posting often moves A/R days before a single patient is contacted.
How should a practice track A/R days?
There is no single good number for every practice: it depends on payer mix, specialty and how much of each bill falls to the patient. Track your own trend instead.
- Pick one formula and one production window, and keep them.
- Take a reading every week, on the same day.
- Report it per location, and split insurance from patient A/R.
- Keep the over-90 bucket next to it.
- Note what changed when the number moves: a new payer, a staff change, a missed statement run.
One measured result, not a benchmark
For the full playbook, read how to reduce dental A/R days.
How ScoutIQ handles it
ScoutIQ works on what drives A/R days: insurance payments posted from every ERA and EOB, patient balances followed up by text, email and mail, and every payment posted to the PMS and reconciled. Atlas tracks A/R by location and explains why it moved.
Patient Billing Automation
Balances collected by text, email and mail, posted on their own.
See Patient Billing Automation