Efficiency of the receivable rotation ratio as a measure of the accounts receivable settlement period

Accounts receivable forecasting, due to a wide range of applications in a number of financial decisions, is an important area of a company’s financial forecasts. Estimation of accounts receivable involves finding solutions for two fundamental problems: forecasting the level of daily sales revenues and estimating the accounts receivable settlement period. This paper addresses the issue of constructing reliable models to be used in forecasting accounts receivable due on deliveries and services – the trend model and the simple regression model. The postulated models, together with a range of alternative methods suggested in the literature on the field, are tested to examine the quality of the resulting estimates of the A/R settlement period. The methods postulated in the paper prove to be functional – on the one hand, the results are reliable, on the other hand, the postulated models can be constructed using readily available data.