Key terms in this article
What is aged debt?
Aged debt is money your customers owe you, sorted by how long an invoice has been unpaid. Age is a warning sign, not proof that a balance is lost. Most UK finance teams track it monthly.
What is a KPI?
A KPI (key performance indicator) is a single number you track over time to see whether something is getting better or worse. Aged debt over 90 days is one of the most useful KPIs a small reseller can watch.
What is credit control?
Credit control is the work of getting paid on time. It covers setting payment terms, chasing overdue invoices, putting accounts on hold and deciding when to stop supplying a customer.
What Is an Aged Debt Report?
An aged debt report lists unpaid invoices, grouped by age. A report may separate invoices that are not yet due, then use overdue groups such as 1 to 30 days, 31 to 60, 61 to 90, and more than 90 days. It is also called an aged debtors report, an ageing report or an AR ageing report.
The point of the report is not the total. The total is on your balance sheet already. The point is the shape. Two businesses can be owed the same £80,000 and be in very different trouble.
Key Takeaways
- An aged debt report groups unpaid invoices by how overdue they are, normally in 30-day buckets
- The shape of the report matters far more than the total
- Debt over 90 days is the number to watch, though 90 days is a review point rather than a cliff
- The report is a to-do list, not an accounting exercise
- Late payment costs the UK economy around £11 billion a year (King’s Speech 2026 background briefing notes, 2026)
- Run it weekly if you can, monthly at the very least
- Prevention beats chasing, and usage paid for in advance never reaches the report
How to Read the Buckets
Each bucket tells you something different, and each one calls for a different response.
Current. Not due yet. On 30-day terms most of your ledger sits here, and that is healthy. Worth checking the invoices actually arrived, but nothing else to do.
1 to 30 days overdue. The due date has gone. Start your reminder schedule, and check for a query or a failed collection. Money recovered here costs you almost nothing.
31 to 60 days overdue. Send a firmer reminder and ask for a payment date. Record any dispute or promise to pay against the account, not just in someone’s head.
61 to 90 days overdue. Something has gone wrong. Look at the account properly instead of sending another automatic email. Check for a dispute, an arrangement or a service problem, then pick up the phone.
Over 90 days overdue. This is a commercial decision, not a billing one. Each balance needs an answer out loud: keep chasing, agree a plan, hold the account, refer it, or write it off on your accountant’s advice.
From our experience: the single most common pattern we see in a new customer’s first aged debt report is a small number of very old balances that everyone in the business has quietly stopped mentioning. Not disputed, not written off, just old. They sit there for years inflating the debtor figure. The first useful act is usually not chasing at all. It is deciding, out loud, which of those are real and which are fiction.
Why Debt Over 90 Days Matters Most
Old debt is harder to collect. There is no official cliff edge at 90 days, and age on its own does not prove a balance is lost, so treat it as the point where you stop chasing and start deciding.
The reasons are practical rather than mysterious:
- People move on. The person who ordered the service leaves. Nobody left at the customer remembers agreeing to it.
- The paperwork gets harder. Purchase orders get archived. Proving the debt takes longer than the debt is worth.
- Silence reads as acceptance. If you have not chased for three months, the customer reasonably assumes it was not important.
- Money gets tight. A customer in real difficulty may need an arrangement, a decision about supply, or proper recovery advice.
So the useful KPI is not total debtors. It is the value sitting beyond 90 days, tracked month to month. If it falls, check why before you celebrate: collecting the money is good news, writing it off is not.
What the Report Cannot Tell You
An aged debt report is a snapshot of balances. On its own it knows nothing about the customer behind them. A few things it will not show you:
- Disputes. An invoice held up by a genuine service problem looks exactly like an invoice held up by a customer who will not pay. Only one of those is a credit control job.
- Payment plans. A customer paying £500 a month against a £6,000 balance is behaving well. The report shows an ugly old balance.
- Direct Debit failures. A failed collection can put a good payer into the 30-day bucket through no fault of their own.
- Whether the customer is still worth having. Some slow payers are still profitable. Some prompt payers are not.
This is why the report works best sitting next to the customer record rather than in a separate accounts package. If the person chasing can see the service, the tickets and the payment history on the same screen, they make better decisions about which of these is which.
How Often Should You Run It?
Monthly is the common answer. Weekly is the better one.
A monthly report tells you what happened. A weekly report lets you act while acting is still cheap. The difference in effort is small if the report is generated for you rather than assembled by hand.
The practical routine that works for most small resellers:
- Weekly: a worklist of what has just fallen overdue, and who is chasing it
- Monthly: the full report, with the over-90 figure recorded and compared to last month
- Quarterly: a proper look at the oldest balances, with a decision on each one
If you want to turn the report into a single number you can trend, debtor days is the usual choice.
Stopping the Debt Before It Starts
The cheapest aged debt report is a short one. Two things shorten it.
The first is chasing earlier and more consistently, which is what most of the credit control process is about.
The second is not extending credit in the first place. Where a customer funds the account in advance, there is no invoice debt for that usage to age. Auto top-up keeps those accounts topped up, though a missing payment method or a failed collection still needs someone to look at it. We have written about how it works on the product site in our post on auto top-up for pre-pay customers.
Neither approach suits every customer. Together they take a lot of weight off the report.
What the Law Gives You
For a qualifying overdue commercial debt, the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 can provide interest and a fixed recovery sum. Interest is 8% above the relevant Bank of England base rate (GOV.UK, 2026). If your contract sets its own rate, you claim that instead, unless the customer is a public authority, where you cannot use a lower rate than the statutory one. The reference rate comes from the relevant 30 June or 31 December date and stays fixed for that debt. Fixed recovery costs are £40 on debts up to £999.99, £70 from £1,000 to £9,999.99, and £100 from £10,000 (GOV.UK, 2026).
You can work out the figure for a specific invoice with our late payment interest calculator.
Knowing the number is useful. Charging it is a separate decision, and usually a last resort rather than routine practice. Our view on that, and why, is set out on the product site in why statutory interest rarely works.
The wider legal picture is changing too. The Commercial Payments Bill would cap standard commercial terms at 60 days, with narrow exemptions. It went to Parliament in May 2026 and is not law yet, and the government has said it will not apply to past payments (GOV.UK, 2026). We covered the announcement in our King’s Speech update.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between an aged debt report and an aged debtors report?
There is no difference. The two names describe the same report, which lists unpaid customer invoices grouped by how overdue they are. You may also see it called an ageing report, an AR ageing report or an aged receivables report. Accounting packages differ on which label they use, but the content is the same.
What is a good aged debt profile?
There is no single benchmark, because it depends on your payment terms and your sector. A useful rule of thumb is that the large majority of your ledger should sit in the current and 0 to 30 day buckets, with very little beyond 90 days. Rather than chasing an industry figure, track your own over-90 balance month to month and aim for it to fall.
Should I write off old aged debt?
Not on age alone. Look at the evidence for each balance instead. The practical test is whether you would spend an hour of someone’s time chasing it, and if the answer has been no for a year, it is not really an asset. A write-off affects tax, VAT and your accounts, so take advice from your accountant first.
Getting the Report to Do Some Work
An aged debt report earns its keep when it stops being a document and becomes a worklist. That means it needs to be in front of the person doing the chasing, updated automatically, and linked to the customer record rather than sitting in a spreadsheet nobody opens.
That is what the credit control side of our CRM is for. It works from live invoice data, so the worklist is current rather than a snapshot from the last export.
If you would like to talk through your own aged debt position, the contact form is the way in.