Dental AR follow-up, worked daily — AR under 30 days, not 90.

An aging report sorts every unpaid dollar by how long it has been outstanding — the 0–30, 31–60, 61–90, and 90+ day buckets. In a healthy practice the dollars concentrate on the left: most claims paid inside 30 days, very little drifting past 90. When the right-hand buckets swell, it is almost never because the payers are slow — it is because nobody worked the claims while they were still easy to collect.

We read the report the way a collector does. The 90+ bucket is triage: money that is hardest to recover and closest to being written off. The 61–90 bucket is the alarm — the appeal window on most denials is closing, and a claim that crosses 90 without action often stays there. The 0–30 bucket is where the real work happens, because a claim worked at 20 days rarely becomes a claim fought at 120. Learn to read your own report in how to read a dental AR aging report.

Insurance AR is money a payer owes. It is worked by calling the payer, correcting and resubmitting the claim, and appealing denials before the filing window closes — a disciplined, deadline-driven queue. Patient AR is money the patient owes, and it behaves differently: it is worked with statements on a cadence, payment plans where they make sense, and, above all, an accurate estimate collected at the time of service so the balance never ages in the first place.

Blending the two into one number is how practices lose track of both. We work them as separate queues with separate playbooks — payer follow-up and appeals on the insurance side, clear communication and a plan on the patient side. And because the best patient-AR strategy is upstream, we tie it back to verification: a patient portion quoted from confirmed benefits at check-in beats a statement mailed sixty days later, every time.

You do not manage AR by staring at a total; you manage it against targets. Days in AR — the average age of your receivables — should sit under 30. Your net collection rate, the share of adjusted production you actually collect, should hold at 95 percent or better. And the aged buckets should trend down rather than up: across the practices we operate for, aged AR typically falls 40 to 60 percent once daily follow-up replaces reactive cleanup.

Watched weekly, those three numbers tell you whether the discipline is working long before the bank balance does. They are also the numbers a practice manager checks first — which is why we report them, not just work them. Production is what you did; collections is what you kept, and AR follow-up is how you close the gap between the two.