Denne veiledningen er ikke oversatt til språket ditt ennå — den engelske versjonen vises.
Days Sales Outstanding answers a specific, useful question: on average, how many days does it take you to collect payment after a sale? It compresses your entire collection performance into one comparable number.
How it's calculated
DSO = (Accounts Receivable ÷ Total Credit Sales) × Number of Days in the Period. In plain terms: what share of a period's sales is still sitting uncollected, expressed as a number of days. Our DSO calculator handles the math directly — plug in receivables, credit sales, and the period, and it returns the figure.
What counts as "good"
There's no universal target — DSO should be compared against your own stated payment terms, not an abstract benchmark. A business with Net 30 terms and a DSO of 35 is collecting close to on schedule; a DSO of 55 against those same Net 30 terms signals a real gap between what you're asking for and what's actually happening. Industry norms vary widely too, so comparing your DSO against a genuinely similar business is more useful than comparing against an industry-wide average.
The trend matters more than any single reading
A single DSO reading is a snapshot; tracked monthly or quarterly, it becomes a trend — and the trend is where the real signal is. A steadily rising DSO, even if the absolute number still looks acceptable, means collection is gradually getting slower, and it's worth investigating before it becomes a larger problem: are payment terms unclear, is follow-up slipping, are certain clients consistently paying later than others?
What moves DSO
- Tighter, clearer payment terms — see setting payment terms.
- Consistent, timely follow-up on invoices as they approach and pass their due date — see invoice follow-up.
- Faster invoicing after work is completed, since DSO counts from the sale, and a delayed invoice pushes the whole clock back.
- More selective credit terms for clients with a history of slow payment.
Use it alongside other AR metrics
DSO is most useful combined with invoice aging (which tells you which specific invoices are driving the number) and AR turnover (a related but distinct way of measuring the same underlying collection speed). Our DSO improvement calculator can also show you, concretely, how much cash would be freed up by bringing your DSO down to a target figure — often a more motivating number than the DSO itself.