Money already earned
Accounts receivable is treatment you have already delivered and have not yet been paid for. This guide explains what the figure contains, what each aging bucket describes, why the number can mislead, and includes a free calculator for your own AR report. CORAL publishes no ideal, average or recommended AR figure.
Start here
One definition, and three things AR is regularly confused with.
Every time treatment is completed and posted, the practice records what is owed for it. If the money does not arrive that day, the balance becomes a receivable: part of it waiting on an insurance carrier, part of it waiting on the patient. AR is the sum of those unpaid balances at one point in time.
That means AR is created by two things happening at different speeds — delivering treatment and being paid for it. A practice can have a growing AR because it is busier, because it is being paid more slowly, or both, and the total alone does not distinguish between those.
Not production. Production is the value of treatment performed in a period. AR is what remains unpaid from any period.
Not collections. Collections is money actually received. Collections reduce AR; they are not the same figure. CORAL’s profitability calculator works from money received, not money owed.
Not profit. AR says nothing about what it cost to produce the treatment. Overhead is a separate question, answered from expenses and collections.
The report itself
Before the percentages mean anything, it helps to know exactly what your software put in them.
Most practice-management systems keep it under reports as aged receivables, AR aging or insurance aging, often with separate versions for insurance balances and patient balances. Some produce a single combined report with columns for each. Find the one you intend to use every month, and note its name and settings so the same person can rerun it identically.
The critical setting is what starts the clock: the date of service, or the date the claim was submitted. The same ledger produces different buckets under each. Reports can also differ on whether they include unapplied credits, balances referred to an outside agency, and treatment posted but not yet claimed. None of these choices is wrong; using two of them in alternate months is.
The four bands
What each bucket describes, and what moves a balance from one to the next.
Bucket boundaries differ between systems — some age 0–29, 30–59 and so on. CORAL uses the labels above; enter your report’s figures into the closest band and keep that mapping consistent from month to month. Read those aging bands alongside your broader collection and financial KPIs rather than treating the outstanding balance as a complete cash-flow picture.
Two different jobs
The same total, split by who owes it, describes two entirely different pieces of work.
Insurance balances move through an adjudication process with its own rules: submission requirements, attachment requirements, appeal windows and filing deadlines. When one stalls, there is usually a specific reason attached to a specific claim.
Patient balances move through conversations. Statements, estimates given before treatment, payment arrangements and how the financial discussion is handled at the visit all shape them. The work is different, the people doing it are often different, and a single combined total tells you nothing about which side moved.
Unapplied credits, overpayments awaiting refund, balances the report does not assign to either category, and accounts held outside the aging report all create a gap. So does running the split report on a different date from the total.
The calculator below reports the difference plainly rather than adjusting one figure to match the other. A difference is information about your ledger, not an error to be hidden.
Free, ungated, nothing stored
Enter what your report shows. Each figure appears once its own inputs are present and reads Not Calculated when they are not. Nothing is scored and nothing is compared to a benchmark.
Every field is optional, and everything stays in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored. Negative figures are accepted, because credit balances are real.
Every unpaid balance on your aging report as of one date.
Balances aged up to 30 days on your report.
Balances aged 31 to 60 days.
Balances aged 61 to 90 days.
Balances aged more than 90 days.
Money actually received per month, over whatever window you choose. Use the same window each time.
The portion your report assigns to carriers. Leave blank if your report does not split it.
The portion your report assigns to patients.
Total accounts receivable
Not Calculated
As entered from your report.
Sum of the four aging buckets
Not Calculated
Shown only when all four buckets are entered.
AR compared with one month of collections
Not Calculated
Total AR ÷ average monthly collections. Requires both figures, and collections greater than zero.
Share of AR aged 0–30 days
Not Calculated
Share of AR aged 31–60 days
Not Calculated
Share of AR aged 61–90 days
Not Calculated
Share of AR over 90 days
Not Calculated
Insurance share of AR
Not Calculated
Patient share of AR
Not Calculated
Want to see the systems that produce these balances? Run the free Reef Health diagnostic.
Wondering why your AR moved this month? Ask CORAL AI.
This calculator is descriptive. It reports what your own figures produce, states which denominator it used, and does not judge the result, score the practice or compare it to an industry figure.
Read with care
The arithmetic is simple. What the figures contain is not.
If contractual adjustments are posted when payment arrives rather than when the claim is submitted, your AR includes amounts you were never going to be paid. The total is real as an accounting figure and overstated as an expectation of cash.
Overpayments and unapplied credits reduce a total without any money moving. A bucket can legitimately be negative. This calculator accepts negative figures rather than rejecting them, and simply reports what they produce.
AR is a photograph taken on one date. A heavy week of treatment immediately before the report, or a carrier batch that landed a day after it, moves the figure without anything changing in how the practice operates.
Some software keeps balances referred to an outside collection agency on the aging report and some removes them. Two practices with identical operations can publish very different AR figures purely because of this setting.
Aging by date of service and aging by date of claim submission produce different buckets from the same ledger. Note which one you ran, and run the same one next month.
A monthly routine
AR management is a repeated routine rather than a single number. These steps are descriptive: none of them sets a target.
Run the aging report on the same day each month
The first business day after month end is the usual choice. Consistency matters more than which day you pick.
Note which aging basis the report used
Date of service or date of claim submission. Mixing the two between months makes any comparison meaningless.
Check the buckets against the total
If they do not add up, find out why before reading anything into the percentages.
Separate insurance AR from patient AR
The two are worked by different people using different steps, so a single total hides which one moved.
Review every claim over 60 days individually
At this age the question is usually what happened to a specific claim, not what the percentage is.
Identify unapplied credits and overpayments
These distort the total in the opposite direction from unpaid claims and are easy to leave sitting for months.
Confirm your write-off decisions are posted
A balance you have already decided not to pursue should not still be counted as owed.
Compare AR with the same month's collections
One number is what you are owed and the other is what arrived. Reading them together is what makes either useful.
Write down what you changed
Next month's movement is only interpretable if you know what was done in between.
Many practices keep this in a spreadsheet, which works until a formula breaks or the report settings quietly change between months. The calculator above can be rerun each month with nothing to download and no formulas to maintain.
How it connects
AR is what you are owed. Collections is what arrived. Cash flow depends on the distance between them.
Treatment produced this month may be collected next month or the month after. That delay is why a practice can be busy and still short of cash, and why AR and collections have to be read next to each other rather than in isolation. Comparing total AR with one month of collections, as the calculator does, is one way of describing the size of that gap in terms you already recognise.
A related but different measure is collection rate — collections divided by production for the same period. It describes how much of what you produced turned into money, rather than how much is still waiting. This page does not duplicate that calculation.
What is left after the money arrives is a third question again, answered from expenses: the overhead guide covers the categories, and the profitability calculator produces overhead and Operating Remainder for a specific month.
Next steps
Each CORAL tool owns a different part of the picture.
The broader practice management framework connects receivables with scheduling, treatment, patient retention and accountable operating systems.
The free Reef Health diagnostic reads the systems behind the balances — scheduling, treatment conversion, collections follow-up and team structure — rather than the balances alone.
Ask CORAL AI answers practice questions in context, and CORAL Team Bonus System connects a team bonus to the practice’s own monthly figures. Plans are on CORAL pricing.
Prefer to walk through your own figures with someone? Book a Practice Intelligence Session.
Questions owners ask
Accounts receivable is the total of treatment you have already delivered and posted but have not yet been paid for, whether the money is expected from an insurance carrier or from the patient. It is not production, not collections and not profit — it is the balance sitting between the completed visit and the deposit.
AR is simply the abbreviation for accounts receivable. When a report or a consultant refers to your AR, they mean the outstanding balances owed to the practice as of a particular date.
Management is a routine rather than a number: run the aging report on a fixed day, reconcile the buckets against the total, separate insurance balances from patient balances, work aged claims individually, apply credits, post the write-offs you have already decided on, and record what you changed so next month's movement can be interpreted. The monthly checklist on this page sets out those steps.
It is the report in your practice-management software that lists outstanding balances grouped by how long they have been outstanding, usually in 0–30, 31–60, 61–90 and over-90-day bands. Different systems name it differently — aged receivables, AR aging, insurance aging — and can age balances from date of service or from date of claim submission.
It means the balance has been outstanding for more than three months. That bucket usually holds a mixture of live claims still being appealed, balances returned for missing information, disputed patient amounts, adjustments that were never posted, and amounts the practice is unlikely to receive. Its size tells you where to look; it does not by itself tell you what went wrong.
Divide total accounts receivable by your average monthly collections. The result is expressed in months — 1.4, for example, means your outstanding balances are equivalent to about 1.4 months of the money you typically collect. The calculator on this page does this when you supply both figures, and reports Not Calculated when either is missing or collections are zero.
Common causes are unapplied credits and overpayments, balances excluded from the aged buckets, accounts referred to an outside agency that are still counted in one figure but not the other, and a total run on a different date or basis from the buckets. The calculator reports the difference rather than silently reconciling it, so you can find the cause in your own ledger.
Insurance AR is the portion your report assigns to carriers; patient AR is the portion assigned to patients. They behave differently: insurance balances usually move through a defined adjudication process with filing deadlines, while patient balances depend on statements, conversations and payment arrangements. Because the two are worked differently, a combined total can hide which one actually changed.
No. Collections is money actually received in a period. AR is money owed to you and not yet received. They are related — collections reduce AR, and new treatment increases it — but they answer different questions. Collection rate, which compares collections with production, is covered on the dental practice KPI reference.
CORAL does not publish AR benchmarks, ideal percentages or target ranges. What your figures mean depends on your insurance mix, your write-off timing, how your software ages balances, whether referred accounts remain on the report, and how recently you treated a large case. This page explains what each figure measures and what moves it, so you can interpret your own numbers rather than compare them with someone else's practice.
CORAL publishes no AR benchmark, ideal range or industry average, and makes no income guarantees. CORAL provides practice-management information and planning tools; it does not provide clinical, legal, tax, payroll or accounting advice. Financial decisions should be reviewed with your accountant, bookkeeper or other appropriate adviser.
