The reminder nobody has to remember to send.

What the Australian data actually says

Australian small businesses were paid an average of 6.6 days late in the December quarter — the second shortest quarterly result since records began in January 2017. Source: Xero Small Business Insights, published March 2026.

The share is the more uncomfortable number: 48% of invoices issued by Australian small businesses in 2021 were paid late, and 10% were paid more than a month overdue. And payment delays were estimated to cost Australian small businesses $1.1 billion a year, from an analysis covering more than 200,000 businesses — Xero and Accenture, Crunch: Cash Flow Challenges Facing Small Businesses, published September 2022.

Two honest caveats on those figures. The 6.6-day number is current and improving, which cuts against the usual doom framing. The 48% and the $1.1 billion come from a study published in September 2022, which is old enough that we would not present it as today’s picture — we quote it because it is the most recent of its kind we could find, not because it is fresh.

Why reminders work and chasing does not

Most late payment is not refusal. It is an invoice sitting in an inbox behind forty other emails, or a bookkeeper who runs payments on Thursdays and did not see it on Wednesday.

A reminder that arrives on schedule solves the majority of those without anyone feeling chased. What does not work is the same business sending nothing for six weeks and then a stern email — that reads as an escalation because it is one.

What a sane reminder sequence looks like

Deliberately unremarkable. The point is reliability, not cleverness — and every step should be something you would be comfortable with a good customer receiving.

• Three days before due A courtesy note. Catches the ones that would have been late by accident, which is most of them.
• On the due date Neutral, with the invoice attached again. Removes the "I cannot find it" reply.
• Seven days over Still polite, now with a payment link. This is where most of the recovery happens.
• Twenty-one days over A human. Not an automated escalation — a person, deciding what this specific relationship needs.

The part we will argue with you about

Stopping the sequence when a customer replies. It sounds obvious and it is the thing most implementations get wrong — a reminder that arrives after the customer has already said "paying Friday" damages more goodwill than the reminder saved.

The second is the twenty-one day step. We will push back on automating it. At that point the question is not whether they were reminded but what is actually going on, and that is a human judgement about a relationship — work customers value because a person did it.

What it will not fix

A customer who cannot pay. Reminders move the ones who forgot; they do nothing for the ones in trouble, and sending more of them to a business in difficulty is both futile and unkind.

It also will not fix invoicing late in the first place. If your invoices go out three weeks after the job, the reminder schedule is optimising the wrong end — that gap is the bigger one and it is entirely within your control.

It will not fix terms nobody agreed to either. If your invoice says 30 days and your customer runs accounts payable on 60, reminders at day seven are arguing with a policy rather than a person. That is a conversation to have when you quote.

One thing worth building alongside it: a payment link on the invoice itself. A reminder that requires someone to log into a portal, find the invoice and arrange a transfer has added friction at exactly the moment you were removing it. Getting the invoice out same-day with a link on it does more than any reminder schedule.

What we have not measured, and what we would measure for you

There is no reliable published Australian figure for how long debtor chasing takes in a small business, and we are not going to borrow one from a vendor whitepaper to make this page more persuasive. Most numbers you will see quoted for this were produced by companies selling the fix.

What we would do instead is count it on one of your jobs. Follow a single job end to end, note every time a human touches this step, and multiply by what that person costs loaded. That is a real number about your business and it takes an afternoon.

You can run the arithmetic yourself first — the leak calculator uses ABS, Average Weekly Earnings, Australia, May 2026 for the wage default and ATO, Super guarantee, current rate for super, and returns a range rather than a single confident figure. If the range comes back under our minimum engagement, that is a real answer and you should stop there.