How the buckets work
- 0-30 days — normal. Terms are still being honoured or barely passed.
- 31-60 days — attention. Something in the delivery, approval or process is stuck.
- 61-90 days — intervention. A person needs to own this balance by name.
- 90+ days — escalation. Decide between a payment plan, a formal demand, or a write-off.
- Buckets should count from the due date, not the issue date.
What aging tells you that a total does not
Two companies can both be owed the same amount and be in completely different health. One is owed it across last month's invoices; the other has been carrying most of it since spring. The total is identical; the risk is not.
Aging also diagnoses upstream problems. A cluster in 31-60 usually means invoices are going out late or landing on the wrong person. A cluster in 90+ usually means nobody owns follow-up.
Reading the report as an operator
- Sort by amount inside the oldest bucket first — the tail is where the recoverable money hides.
- Check delivery evidence before assuming refusal to pay.
- Separate disputes from silence; they need different conversations.
- Look for one customer appearing repeatedly across buckets.
- Track the trend week over week, not the snapshot.
Turning the report into a weekly routine
Aging only creates cash when it drives action. A fifteen-minute weekly review, with one named owner per balance over a threshold you choose, does more than any dashboard redesign.
Decide in advance what triggers escalation — an amount, an age, or both — so the decision is not renegotiated emotionally every time a long-standing customer is involved.