You might have an overall handle on your accounts receivable through the overall accounts receivable aging. That’s good, but it might be a big view of the forest and you could be missing out on some important trends.

The solution? Drill down. Drill down to:

1. Sales territory. You might have different receivable results by sales territory. Some could be badly underperforming. By getting them up to speed, you could significantly improve your collection.

2. Geography. Countries could have very different receivable patterns. It also might be very different according to certain regions of the country. It could be too that you might have better experience closer to where you are at than from farther away.

3. Type of product. You could have different receivable results by type of product. This might be harder to breakout, but if you can it could give you pretty powerful insights.

4. Type of service. Here too could be very meaningful and again might be tough to breakout. Different services may be attracting different customers or there may be different levels of customer satisfaction and these could all translate to different receivable’s collection rates.

Compare these against your overall average. See where the soft spots are. Which categories have the highest bad debts? Which tend to be coming in slowest on the collections and have the highest day’s sales outstanding?

Through this you could get some real insights on how to improve your collections. That could put you in more focused directions rather than just slugging your way through the entire accounts receivable balance.