What this page covers
Accounts receivable follow-up is the work of chasing submitted claims that have not paid, and it is the largest recurring phone burden in most billing operations. Days in A/R is the metric leadership watches, and it climbs when aged claims sit in a queue no one has time to call on. The fix is not more dialing, it is working the aging in the right order and writing every result back so claims move. Flexbone does both.
Days in A/R and aging buckets
Receivables are tracked in aging buckets, commonly 0 to 30, 31 to 60, 61 to 90, 91 to 120, and over 120 days. Days in A/R measures the average time a dollar of billed revenue stays unpaid. The longer a claim ages, the lower the odds of full collection, and claims past 90 days are where write-offs concentrate. A high or rising A/R figure usually means follow-up is not keeping pace with the volume of unpaid and underpaid claims, not that the claims are uncollectable.
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Why A/R follow-up is still phone-heavy
Plenty of A/R work can start electronically with a claim status check, but resolution often needs a call. The claim is pending with no reason, the payer says it was never received, the remit underpaid against the contract, or the denial reason on the 277 does not match the chart. Each of these means calling the payer, holding the queue, getting a representative, and working the specific claim. For a busy practice or hospital, the unpaid list grows faster than a team can call it, so the oldest and the largest claims slip. This is the pattern that drives days in A/R up.
Prioritizing by value and age
The single biggest lever in A/R is order of operations. A strong biller works the claims where the most dollars are recoverable and the clock is closest to timely-filing or write-off, not whatever is on top of the pile. Flexbone scores the open A/R by dollars at risk, age against the aging buckets, and proximity to the timely-filing limit, then works the list in that order. Underpaid claims get checked against the expected contract amount so contractual underpayments are caught, not just zero-pay denials.
How Flexbone runs A/R follow-up
Flexbone works the aging as a continuous, prioritized queue. It runs the electronic status check first, calls the payer when resolution needs a person, captures the status, reason, and reference number, and writes the next action back into the PM system: rebill, appeal, correct and resubmit, or route to a biller for a judgment call. Denials that share a root cause are grouped so the fix can be applied across the batch rather than one claim at a time. The work is scoped to your payers, contracts, and PM system, and it reports days in A/R and recovered dollars so the impact is measurable.