Reducing days in accounts receivable means fixing the specific points where claims stall — eligibility verification, coding accuracy, timely filing, and denial follow-up. Most practices see the biggest gains from tightening front-end eligibility checks and working denials within 48 hours instead of letting them age.
Forty-five days isn’t a bad number until you compare it against what your best payer actually pays in.
Days in accounts receivable hides a lot when it’s reported as one blended figure.
Why AR Days Creep Up in the First Place
Eligibility gets checked at intake and never rechecked before the actual visit.
Coverage lapses happen constantly. A policy active three weeks ago might not be active today.
- The Coding Connection Nobody Mentions
Coding errors don’t always trigger an outright denial.
Sometimes they trigger a pended claim that sits in limbo for weeks while a payer requests more documentation — and that sitting time counts against AR days just as much as a rejection does.
Fixing the Front End First
Verify eligibility within 24-48 hours of the scheduled visit, not at the time of scheduling itself.
Authorization requirements get missed constantly here — not because staff are careless, but because payer rules change without much warning.
I’ll be honest, this surprised me too: a huge share of aging claims trace back to a single missing authorization field, not a coding mistake at all.
- Working Denials Faster
Speed matters more here than almost anywhere else in the cycle.
A denial worked within 48 hours has a real shot at recovery.
One left for three weeks often runs into a payer’s appeal filing deadline, and once that window closes, the claim is gone regardless of how correct the original submission was.
- Prioritizing by Dollar Value, Not Age
Sorting the denial queue by claim age feels intuitive. It’s usually wrong.
Sort by dollar value first — a $40 denial and a $4,000 denial take roughly the same staff time to work, so the math favors the bigger claim every time.
Segmenting AR by Payer
Blended AR days numbers hide payer-specific problems.
A practice might report 38 days overall while one commercial payer sits quietly at 95 days, dragging the average down for everyone else.
Breaking AR into payer-specific buckets shows exactly where the real bottleneck lives, and it usually isn’t where the blended number points.
Common Mistakes That Keep AR High
Following up on claims by phone before checking the payer portal wastes time — most status updates post there faster than any hold-queue conversation.
Resubmitting a denied claim without correcting the actual denial reason just restarts the clock without fixing anything.
- Write-Offs Happening Too Early
Write-offs get processed too early sometimes, before a legitimate appeal window has even closed.
This ties into timely filing limits directly, and separately into prior authorization tracking — both worth a dedicated look of their own.
How Billrhealth Supports This Process
Billrhealth runs AR recovery for practices that don’t have the staff bandwidth to chase every payer, every day. Here’s what that actually looks like:
- We check each payer’s own filing rules and terms-and-conditions instead of using one blanket timeline for everyone
- Aging claims get worked based on real payer deadlines, not guesswork
- No more “we’ll get to it next week” — claims get followed up before they age out of the appeal window
Conclusion
Days in accounts receivable drops when claims get worked by dollar value and payer segment, not treated as one blended average waiting to slowly improve on its own. Pull your AR aging report this week, split it by payer, and work the largest outlier first — that’s the fastest path to a real number change.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What’s considered a good AR days number?
Under 40 days is strong for most specialties. Above 50, something in eligibility or coding is probably slipping through before submission.
- Does outsourcing billing actually lower AR days?
Not automatically. It depends entirely on how fast that partner works denials and whether they segment by payer instead of treating AR as one number.
- Why do AR days stay high even with a low denial rate?
Pended claims. A claim can avoid outright denial and still sit unpaid for weeks waiting on additional documentation a payer requested.