QuickBooks AR Aging Report: Who Owes You

An aging report lists what customers owe. The useful reading is by customer concentration and by how far past due, in that order.

A QuickBooks AR aging report tells you who owes you money and how late it is. To read it well, total the open balances by customer first, then by how many days past due, and chase in the order of overdue amount. The first view shows concentration and the second shows risk. This post shows the by-hand method and how to get the same answer by asking.

Use the detail report

QuickBooks has an A/R Aging Summary and an A/R Aging Detail. The summary gives one row per customer with bucket columns, which is useful for a quick scan. The detail lists each open invoice with its transaction type, number, date, due date, days past due and open balance. For action, use the detail, because you need to know which invoice to chase and what it is for.

Buckets, then concentration

Buckets are the familiar bands: current, 1-30, 31-60, 61-90 and over 90 days past due. Total each. A healthy-looking total can hide a problem if most of the balance sits in the older bands.

Example (illustrative)
Bucket          Open balance   Share
Current            42,000       52%
1-30 past due      21,000       26%
31-60               9,000       11%
61-90               5,500        7%
Over 90             3,500        4%
Total              81,000

Then flip the view: total by customer. In the example, if two customers hold 60 percent of the open balance, the risk is two phone calls, not a process. Concentration changes what you do: a long tail of small overdue invoices calls for a reminder sequence, while one large overdue customer calls for a conversation.

Deciding the chase order

• Rank by overdue balance, not open balance. Not-yet-due invoices are not a chase.
• Within a customer, start with the oldest invoice.
• Check the credit memos and payments on account first. A customer with unapplied payments may owe less than it appears.
• Mark any invoice that is in dispute. It needs a different conversation.

If you invoice from a time-tracking system, the open invoice in QuickBooks and the invoice in that system should agree; see combining Harvest and QuickBooks exports for how to line them up.

Getting the answer by asking

The [QuickBooks] Open invoices dataset comes from the QuickBooks A/R Aging Detail: one row per invoice with a balance still open, with customer, transaction type, document number, dates, days_past_due, aging_bucket, amount and open balance. Two defined metrics sit on it: Open receivables (what customers owe today) and Overdue receivables (open balances past their due date). You can ask:

• Who owes us the most, and how overdue is it?
• What is our overdue receivables total, by customer?
• How much is in the over-90-day bucket?

The sibling dataset [QuickBooks] Open bills gives the payable side, with the Open payables metric, so you can ask what you owe vendors in the same breath. Definitions live once in Company Context, so overdue means past due date today for everyone, and the answer shows which rows it summed. The connector is read-only, refreshes daily and is included in paid plans. For the larger picture, see QuickBooks AI.

A worked example: reading the chase list

Imagine open receivables of 81,000 (an illustrative example) with 22,000 overdue. Customer X owes 11,000, of which 9,000 is 45 days late. Customer Y owes 6,500 across four small invoices, each under 15 days late. Customer Z owes 4,500, all current. The right actions differ: a call to X, a reminder email to Y, nothing for Z.

A bucket total alone would show 22,000 overdue and suggest one uniform effort. Adding the customer view turns it into three different tasks. It also tells you something about process: if Y repeatedly lands in the 1-30 band, the issue may be how invoices reach their approver, not whether Y intends to pay. That is a question the data raises, not one it answers.

The other side: open bills

Receivables are half the cash picture. The A/P Aging Detail lists what you owe vendors, with the same due date and days past due logic. Reading both together tells you whether the cash coming in covers the cash going out in the next few weeks. That is a planning question and the report only supplies the balances; the timing of payments and any terms you have agreed are decisions that sit outside it.

Limits

• Today only. Both aging datasets are snapshots of the current day, with no date filter. There is no history of last month's aging in the dataset; if you need trends, save the totals each month elsewhere.
• Freshness. The data refreshes daily, so a payment recorded this afternoon shows tomorrow.
• Days past due is zero until the due date. A not-yet-due invoice appears with 0, so filter on a value greater than zero for overdue.
• It shows balances, not reasons. A disputed invoice and a forgotten invoice look identical in the data.

A monthly habit that keeps the history

Because the aging is a snapshot, the best way to get a trend is to record three numbers on the same day each month: total open, total overdue, and the over-90 figure. A three-column list over a year gives you a trend that the report itself cannot. It takes a minute and tells you whether collections are improving, which no single aging report can.

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