The A/R Aging Summary in QuickBooks Online

The Accounts Receivable Aging Summary shows how much your customers owe you and how overdue each balance is, stated as of a date you choose. It takes every unpaid customer balance and sorts it into age buckets, so you can see at a glance what is current and what has been sitting unpaid for a month, two months, or longer. It is the standard way to read the health of your receivables on one page.

What the A/R Aging Summary shows

Each row is a customer, and the columns break their open balance into aging periods. The default columns are Current, 1 to 30 days, 31 to 60 days, 61 to 90 days, and 91 days and over, with a total for each customer and a grand total across all of them at the bottom. The report answers two questions together: who owes you money, and how long it has been outstanding. QuickBooks decides which bucket a balance falls into based on the report date and the aging method you set, so the same customer can move from Current to a later column as time passes and an invoice goes unpaid.

A snapshot as of one date

This is an as-of report, not a period report, and it does not change with the cash or accrual accounting method. It shows the receivables that were open as of the single date you run it for, so two runs on two different dates can look very different as invoices are paid and new ones are issued. Because it is a point-in-time picture, the date you choose is part of the record: an aging report as of a year-end says something specific about where your collections stood at that moment.

Why a CPA or auditor asks for it

The aging summary is how an accountant judges the quality of your receivables. A balance that is mostly current reads very differently from one where large amounts sit past 90 days, and that distinction feeds decisions about whether any of it is collectible and whether an allowance for doubtful accounts is warranted. The grand total usually ties to the accounts receivable line on an accrual-basis Balance Sheet for the same date, so a preparer or auditor can use the aging to see what makes up that single number. A lender or a buyer reviewing the business reads it to gauge how reliably your customers pay.

How to run and export the A/R Aging Summary in QuickBooks Online

1. Go to the Reports menu and type "A/R Aging Summary" into the report search box, then open it.
2. Set the report date to the as-of date you want the balances measured against. For an archive, run it as of each fiscal year-end so you keep the receivable position at the close of each year.
3. If you want to match a specific setup, adjust the aging method and the days per aging period near the top, then run the report.
4. Use the export control at the top of the report to export it to Excel or PDF. The file downloads to your computer.
5. To see the invoices behind any total, open the A/R Aging Detail, which lists the report line by line.

Because the aging is a snapshot, a single All Dates run does not capture where things stood at each year-end, so running it as of each year-end is what preserves the history. Our guide to exporting all your data from QuickBooks covers how the aging reports fit with the rest of your records.

Keeping the A/R Aging Summary after you cancel

The A/R Aging Summary is part of your Books Backup archive. A cancelled paid QuickBooks Online company stays read-only for 12 months and is then permanently deleted, a trial only 90 days, and the IRS generally expects business records to be kept for at least three years, and longer in some situations. A year-end aging can be hard or impossible to recreate once the company is deleted or the underlying transactions change, because the report depends on the state of your books on that exact date.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between the Aging Summary and the Aging Detail?

The summary gives you one line per customer with their balance spread across the age buckets. The A/R Aging Detail breaks that down to the individual unpaid invoices behind each total, with their dates and amounts, so you can see exactly which invoices are overdue.

Does the A/R Aging Summary change with cash or accrual basis?

No. It is a date-based snapshot of the invoices that are open as of the report date, so it does not toggle between cash and accrual the way the ledger and the financial statements do. What changes it is the report date and which invoices remain unpaid on that date.

Why keep an aging report if I have the invoices?

The aging captures how your receivables stood on a specific date, which the raw invoices alone do not tell you once balances are paid and closed. For a year-end position, a lender question, or an audit of a past year, a saved aging as of that date gives you a fixed copy instead of relying on the live books still being available and unchanged.