The insurance aging report in athenaOne is the fastest way to see what payers still owe your practice and how long they have owed it. Getting the raw data out of the platform, in a format you can actually sort and filter, is a different task. This guide covers the full export workflow: where to find the report, which filters to set, what the output columns mean, and where the standard aging export falls short when you need claim-level denial data.
What the aging report actually shows
The insurance AR aging report summarizes outstanding claim balances by payer and by how long each balance has been outstanding. The standard aging buckets are 0 to 30 days, 31 to 60 days, 61 to 90 days, 91 to 120 days, and 120 or more days. Each row in the export represents a claim or a service line (depending on the report level you pull), and the bucket shows when the balance first aged past payment.
That is useful for prioritizing work. A $300 balance in the 31 to 60 bucket is more urgent than one in the 0 to 30 bucket; a balance sitting past 120 days is at risk of missing the payer's appeal window entirely. But the aging report does not tell you why a claim is unpaid. Denial reason codes (CARC/RARC) come from the 835/ERA file, and they live in a different report.
Finding the report in athenaOne
The path has shifted slightly across athenaOne versions, but the general navigation is:
- Log into athenaOne and navigate to Analytics (orReports on older instances). The label depends on your athenaOne version.
- Under the Billing or Revenue Cycle section, look for Insurance AR Aging or Payer Aging Report. Some configurations label it "AR Summary by Payer."
- If you cannot locate it under Billing, use the Reports search bar and type "aging." athenaOne surfaces matching report templates.
Setting the right filters before you run it
Running an unfiltered aging report on a large practice can time out or produce a file too wide to open cleanly. Set these filters before running:
- Department: If your practice has multiple locations, filter to one department at a time. Trying to export all departments at once often exceeds row limits.
- Payer / Insurance Package: For payer-specific work, filter by a single payer or payer group. This keeps the file manageable and makes sorting in the spreadsheet faster.
- Claim Status: Set to "Outstanding" or "Open" to exclude already-resolved claims. Including closed claims inflates the file and adds noise.
- Date Range: Use the date of service range, not the billing date, for consistency with payer timely-filing windows.
- Minimum Balance: Many athenaOne aging reports allow a minimum balance threshold. Setting even a $1 floor removes zero-balance rows that often appear when a claim partially paid.
Running the export
Once filters are set, run the report and wait for it to queue. For large practices, athenaOne queues the report and sends a notification when it is ready; you do not need to leave the browser open. When the report completes, download it as CSV. The Excel (.xlsx) option works too, but CSV keeps column formatting predictable and avoids athenaOne's date serialization quirks in Excel.
Open the CSV in a spreadsheet. The columns you need for denial management work are:
- Claim ID / Claim Number: The identifier you will reference when working the payer portal.
- Patient Name and Date of Service: For matching to the clinical record.
- Primary Payer and Plan: Needed to route the claim to the right appeal channel.
- Billed Amount, Paid Amount, and Outstanding Balance: The arithmetic for recovery value.
- Aging Bucket: Your priority signal.
The gap: aging does not include denial reason codes
This is where many billing teams get stuck. They export the aging report, see a list of open balances, and have no idea what each payer's denial code is. That is not a data entry gap: the aging report was never designed to carry CARC and RARC codes. Those come from the 835/ERA file and live in a separate athenaOne report.
Without the denial code layer, you are working blind. A 90-day-old balance might be a CO-4 modifier error that resolves with a corrected claim in ten minutes, or a CO-50 medical-necessity dispute requiring clinical documentation and a formal appeal letter. The aging report tells you the balance is there; the ERA tells you what to do with it.
Using the combined data to find patterns
Once you have aging and ERA data joined on Claim ID, sort the combined file by CARC code, then by payer. The goal is to find systematic denial patterns before touching individual claims. A stack of CO-97 denials from a single commercial payer in the 31 to 60 bucket is a billing rule issue, not ten separate errors. Work it as a batch: one corrected claim template, one cover letter, ten submissions.
The same logic applies to underpayments. When the paid amount is less than billed but the balance shows zero (the claim "closed"), pull those rows and compare each CO-45 allowed amount to your contracted rate. A systematic gap there is recoverable as a contract dispute, not a denial appeal. The write-off benchmarks guide covers how to assess whether your write-off rate reflects expected contractual adjustments or revenue you could have recovered.
A note for Texas practices
If your aging report surfaces balances from state-regulated commercial plans past the statutory payment window, statutory interest may have already started accruing. The days-outstanding column in your export is the input for that calculation. See the Texas 18% interest guide for the mechanics.
Getting the most out of the export
The athenaOne aging export is a starting point. Its value comes from combining it with ERA data, filtering before you run rather than after, and sorting by denial pattern rather than by individual claim. The practices that recover the most from their aging report treat the export as a discovery step, not the whole workflow. From there, the claim-by-claim work follows a predictable sequence: pattern identified, denial code confirmed, corrected claim or appeal drafted, submitted.