Accounts receivable (A/R)
Accounts receivable (A/R) is the money owed to a provider for care already delivered but not yet collected — from payers and from patients.
Updated
Accounts receivable (A/R) is the total value of care a provider has billed but not yet been paid for — the balances still open with payers and patients after services are delivered. It is the revenue “in the pipeline” between the visit and the collected payment.
A/R is typically monitored by age, in buckets such as 0–30, 31–60, 61–90, and over 90 days, because the older a balance grows, the less likely it is to be collected.
In practice
Working aged A/R promptly is a core back-end discipline: value sitting in the 90-plus-day bucket is at real risk of never being collected. How quickly A/R converts to cash is tracked by the days-in-A/R metric, and the share of collectible revenue actually recovered is tracked by net collection rate.
Commonly confused with
- Days in A/R: Days in A/R is the metric that measures how long A/R takes to collect; A/R is the open balance itself.
- Write-off: A write-off removes an uncollectible balance from A/R; A/R is the balance while it is still open and being worked.