Aging Schedule

You might think this is a list of your middle-age to late-age birthdays, and the relative humiliations that come with each: back pain, gluten-free cake, perfunctory birthday cards from your kids that arrive two weeks late, gluten-and-sugar-free cake, perfunctory birthday cards from your grandkids that arrive six weeks late, no cake, completely forgetting it's your birthday, and then, finally, death.

But no, the term "aging schedule" has to do with accounts scheduling in business.

An aging schedule is a way to arrange a company's invoices and bills according to when they are due. Basically, you are figuring out when money is coming in and when it has to go out. This helps you arrange the company's short-term capital needs. Run out of cash, and you're pretty much dead.

Aging of accounts receivable is a carefully tracked metric that bean-counters use to figure out how well the company is collecting its bills, for example. If that aging schedule moves meaningfully from one period to another, it usually signals that either the company's business is falling off a cliff, i.e. it's selling a lot less product, so it suddenly has a lot less in accounts receivable; if the aging term shortens, it might mean that buyers are leaping to their checkbooks to quickly pay off obligations to the company so that they can buy more.