Glossary · Bookkeeping & QuickBooks term
Accounts receivable
The money your customers owe you for goods or services already delivered but not yet paid — an asset on your balance sheet until the cash arrives.
In plain terms
What accounts receivable means.
Accounts receivable (AR) is the total amount your customers owe you for goods or services you have already delivered or invoiced but not yet been paid for. It is recorded as a current asset on the balance sheet, because it represents cash you expect to collect.
On accrual-basis books, revenue is recorded when you invoice (earn) it — which creates the receivable — and the receivable clears when the customer pays. AR is tracked per customer and per invoice, and grouped by how overdue it is in an “aging” report.
AR aging is a cash-flow early-warning.
A growing or aging accounts-receivable balance is one of the earliest signals of a cash problem: the business is profitable on paper but the money is stuck in unpaid invoices. The AR aging report — current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, 90+ days — tells you exactly which customers are slow and how much cash is tied up.
Accurate AR depends on accurate books: if invoices and payments aren’t recorded and matched correctly, the aging report lies. That’s why AR clean-up — matching payments to invoices, writing off truly uncollectible balances — is a common part of a cleanup.
Accounts receivable vs. accounts payable.
They are mirror images. Accounts receivable is money owed to you (an asset). Accounts payable is money you owe others (a liability). One customer’s receivable is its vendor’s payable.
Put it to work
Is your AR aging report trustworthy?
A Certified ProAdvisor checks whether payments are matched to invoices and what’s really collectible — with a written fixed-fee scope to clean it up.