Accounts receivable tips for small business: a practical glossary and playbook

These accounts receivable tips for small business readers assume you are not about to read a 400-page credit manual, but you are willing to be precise in a few words: what you are owed, to whom, by when, and what happened last in email. The prize is not a perfect theoretical AR department. The prize is fewer Friday surprises on payroll, fewer awkward client calls that could have been a two-line nudge, and a bank reconciliation that your future self (or your bookkeeper) can actually follow.

Mini-glossary: DSO, aging, dunning, net terms (plain language)

• DSO (days sales outstanding): a rough “how long, on average, you wait to get paid after you invoice” number under a chosen definition. Useful if you track it the same way every month.
• Aging: buckets like current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90+ days past due, which show where stress is piling up.
• Dunning: a fancy word for payment follow-up, usually as a polite sequence, not a courtroom drama, unless you are truly in a collections path (then get professional advice).
• Net terms: “net 30” and friends—calendar meaning should match your contract and the customer’s country norms.

Tip set A: the invoice and master data (fix upstream first)

Aging reports do not fix a wrong vendor legal name. Before you “work AR harder,” re-read a sample of rejected or delayed payables from your best customers. If a pattern is “PO in the wrong line,” you do not have a dunning software gap; you have a data entry and quoting gap. The tips in invoice payment tips and get invoices paid faster are intentionally upstream of classic AR metrics.

Tip set B: a weekly 30–45 minute AR slot (non-negotiable if you have more than a few open items)

Open a single list, sorted by amount or age, and walk top to bottom: update pay dates, mark disputes, nudge, or hand off. If the slot is “whenever I panic,” the receivable is running you. A quiet weekly slot, even 30 minutes, beats heroic monthly scrambles. Pair it with the improve the accounts receivable process article for a more step-by-step redesign.