Write off your oldest bucket this afternoon and days in A/R falls tomorrow morning. Nothing was collected. Nothing improved. The number simply got better, which is the problem with reporting an average as though it were a measurement.

Revenue is tracked by payer. Cost is tracked by department. So the one number that decides whether a contract is worth holding — what it costs you to collect a dollar from that payer — belongs to nobody and appears nowhere.

A new clinician starts on Monday. The enrolment application goes out three weeks later. Every patient seen in between may be permanently unbillable — and no appeal will ever recover it, because those claims were never payable in the first place.