Baseline
Here is the book, and here is the ladder it is supposed to be sitting on.
- Not yet 30 days old$2,469,96652%
- 31 to 60 days$1,445,49330%
- 61 to 90 daysaged$577,37312%
- Over 90 daysaged$291,7416%
The receivable at 31 Dec 2025, $4,784,574 in total. Each bucket is rounded to the dollar on its own, so they add to $4,784,573 where the total reads $4,784,574. Both are correct; neither was adjusted to close the gap.
Of that, $1,798,163 across 96 invoices and 23 accounts is past its due date. Every one of them sits at a step on the follow-up ladder.
That ladder is real in the sense that the steps exist. What it is not is anybody's job. It runs out of one person's memory, on top of the rest of their week, and the account that gets called is usually the one that called first.
- First reminder47$769,236
- Second notice34$733,702
- Phone call10$176,573
- Escalated5$118,652
The four steps are the whole past-due book. Each is rounded on its own, so the parts may not add to the last digit.
Where it leaks
Past sixty days is where the money stops behaving like a receivable. Half the question is how much — the other half is why.
Not written off and not disputed by definition — just old. The longer a balance sits here the less of it tends to come back, which is why this line and not the total is the one to watch.
Your own revenue, divided down to a day, then divided into the balance. Both figures above are rounded on their own, so re-dividing them as printed happens to land on the same answer here — it need not.
Not a fee anybody charges you — it is what the money would have earned or saved if it were in the business instead of on somebody else's balance sheet.
The rate, and why it is the low one
We used the bank prime loan rate — the published one, not a rate we picked. Most small and mid-size manufacturers borrow at that or above, so treat this as the floor. Your own facility rate is higher, and the diagnostic uses it.
Federal Reserve H.15, Selected Interest Rates, as of 3 August 2026.
Why it is late decides who should be chasing it
Split the same balance by whether anybody raised a problem with the invoice.
a defect, not a collections problem
Chasing this harder does not move it. Something went wrong upstream — the shipment, the price, the paperwork — and the fix belongs where the mistake was made, not on the phone.
This is the part a follow-up process actually moves. It is the larger share, which is the reason the queue below is worth building.
And the queried ones are not random. One reason — short-ship — accounts for 38.1% of every query raised this year, 150 of 394. That is a single upstream fix showing up as a year of phone calls.
Nothing is collected today. These invoices are already billed and already owed — a queue changes when they get worked, not whether the money is yours. On the book you have right now the cash shows up about one collection cycle out. We say that before the change, not after it.
Working down the book you have today happens once. You can't collect the same dollar twice, so the number that carries forward is the rate your aging rolls at — not this year's catch-up, repeated.
A ladder doesn't change when your customer runs payments. Part of this is discipline on your side and part of it is their approval queue and their pay run, which differ by account. We'd find that out per account rather than assume it.
The fix
Three tiers on one screen, and the third one is a person with a phone. That is the design, not a gap in it.
The day gets allocated by dollars at risk.
Not a measure of effort. An invoice counts as worked if somebody touched the account after it moved up a step — which is the one version of this question that needs no assumption about how often anybody should be calling.
This is arithmetic about the order of a list, not a claim about how hard anybody works. The same invoices are on both lists. Only the order changes, and the order decides what gets reached on a day that runs out.
The day, as it happens now
Sorted by whoever was most recently in the conversation — our stand-in for memory-driven follow-up. The books record when an account was last touched, not why, so read this as the shape of the problem rather than a measurement of it.
- Everglade FoodsINV-2025-03310$12,603Second notice43 days past duelast touched 1 days agodisputed
- Harbor FabricationINV-2025-03506$7,814Second notice17 days past duelast touched 1 days ago
- Beacon HydraulicsINV-2025-03508$9,150First reminder1 days past duelast touched 1 days agodisputed
- Fairwind TurbinesINV-2025-03526$5,811First reminder6 days past duelast touched 1 days ago
- Peninsula GearworksINV-2025-03387$24,312Second notice43 days past duelast touched 2 days ago
- Cortez Marine WorksINV-2025-03404$28,513First reminder2 days past duelast touched 2 days ago
A drafted follow-up, from what the account already told you.
One rung up. The account has a history, the invoice has a stage, and the note that would go out next is already written. A person reads it and decides.
Second notice · 18 days past due
Sawgrass Tooling — INV-2025-03350, $76,218
Following up on INV-2025-03350, $76,218, due 2025-12-13. I have not seen a payment date yet. Is this sitting with approvals, or is there a problem with the paperwork? Happy to resend anything you need.
Written in advance and stored with the example data — nothing is generated while you watch.
A person decides. Nothing sends itself.
The draft is the account's own — its invoice, its amount, its due date. It is not a template with the name swapped in, and it is not going anywhere until somebody presses a button.
And then there is the account where the ladder stops. Biggest balance past due, outside the rule, and a relationship attached to it. A queue can tell you that. A queue must not tell you what to do about it.
This one is a phone call, and it's yours.
The written rule
Copperfield Valve
- Credit limit on this account$275,000
- Hold when an invoice goes past due by60 daysoutside
- Named exception approverM. Reyes
- Open balance today$258,692
- Of that, past due$187,201
- Oldest invoice78 days past due
Raised 14 Feb 2025, decided 14 Feb 2025.
Asked for by D. Okafor. Approved by D. Okafor.
Decided the same day it was raised. Across the whole log the middle one takes 4.00 days.
The person who asked for it is the person who approved it. On paper this account has a control. In practice nobody outside the request has looked at it.
Nothing here decides itself, and nothing here will. The buttons write down what you chose.
Across the year's decision log, 10 of 36 were approved by the person who asked for them. The point of writing the rule down is that somebody else gets to read it.
Holding it
How you would know it stayed fixed.
1.27–25.4 %
Limits from 52 periods. No lower limit is drawn: the computed one falls past the floor this measure cannot cross, and a period sitting at that floor is the target rather than something to investigate. Beneath: how much it moved from one period to the next.
We watch the numbers with you monthly, and it stays fixed.
Of the dollars sitting in the sixty-day bucket on Monday, this is the share still unpaid and a bucket older by the following Monday. A dollar leaves that number by being collected, so lower is better and zero is the target rather than an alarm. Each week rests on between 71 and 101 invoices, which is enough for one week's reading to mean the same thing as the next one's.
This is the measure the ladder actually moves, and it is why the headline ratio is not the one with limits on it. It is a flow: each week is its own reading, and a week that steps outside the band is a week worth asking about.
No week is flagged across the 52 of them, so nothing here is a special case. This is what the process does when it is left alone — a centre line at 10.4% and an upper limit at 23.0% — and that band is what a change would be measured against.
There is no second line, because there is no "after" yet. The week the queue goes live is where the band gets recomputed, and until the new run is long enough to set its own it gets measured against this one.
49.9–64.1 days
Run chart — no control limits. This measure is a ratio of a rolling year, so its points are not independent.
The number everybody quotes belongs on the wall too, and it belongs there without limits. Each point is a balance over a rolling year of revenue, so consecutive months share almost all of their denominator and cannot be treated as independent readings. Drawing limits on it would manufacture signals out of the overlap. Watch the direction, not the wobble — and watch the chart above it for whether anything actually changed.
One thing this example cannot show you, said plainly: when somebody promises to pay on a date, that promise should be tracked to the date and chased when it slips. This company's books hold no record of a promise being made, so there is nothing here to chart. It is the ordinary case, and it is the first thing the queue starts capturing — because until it does, "they said they'd pay" lives in somebody's memory and nowhere else.