The problem

Australian small businesses are getting squeezed. Not by competition. Not by bad products or lazy work. By money that's owed to them and doesn't arrive.

$115 billion a year. That's how much is sitting in unpaid invoices across this country. More than half of all invoices are paid late. Not a week late. Twenty-three days late, on average. And for industries like construction and trades, the real number is worse — fifty-day payment terms where fewer than one in six customers pay within thirty.

This isn't a rounding error. It's a structural failure. And it's compounding.

The squeeze

In 2024, over ten thousand Australian companies entered insolvency. That's the highest number in more than a decade. Construction alone accounted for nearly twenty-eight per cent of them — 2,832 businesses gone in a single financial year.

These aren't faceless corporations. They're sparkie crews and concreters. Residential builders carrying six-figure receivables while funding materials out of personal savings. Subcontractors who finished the work months ago and are still waiting on a head contractor to release payment.

Sixty per cent of Australian SMEs operate with low or zero cash reserves. When a major invoice doesn't land, the business doesn't just slow down. It stops. And the person who built it starts wondering whether to dip into the mortgage to make payroll.

The cash flow crisis in this country is not a downturn. It's a design flaw.

What exists today doesn't solve it

The traditional answer to unpaid invoices is a debt collection agency. You hand your invoices to a third party who takes fifteen to thirty per cent of whatever they recover, uses tactics that torch the customer relationship, and gives you almost no visibility into what's happening.

For a small business, that's not a solution. That's a tax on a problem that shouldn't exist.

The alternative is doing it yourself — chasing invoices manually, writing awkward emails, making uncomfortable phone calls, losing ten hours a week to work that produces nothing billable. Most business owners I've spoken to just accept the pain. They treat late payment as the cost of doing business and adjust their lives around it.

I spent years in tech, building products in logistics. I saw the payment problem from the inside. I watched businesses run lean, move fast, deliver real work — and then stall because the money didn't follow the value. The infrastructure to move goods has been digitised. The infrastructure to make sure people get paid for it barely exists.

The debt collection industry hasn't been rebuilt. It's been left alone. And the reason is simple: the incumbents make money from the problem. A commission-based model has no incentive to fix the system. It feeds on it.

What Chargetree is

Chargetree is the other side of that equation.

We built an automated collections platform purpose-designed for Australian small businesses — B2B invoice recovery that runs in the background, preserves your customer relationships, integrates directly with your accounting software, and costs a flat monthly fee instead of a cut of every dollar recovered.

No commissions. No lock-in contracts. No aggressive third-party letters with someone else's name on them.

Your reminders come from your business. Your branding. Your tone. Escalation happens gradually, professionally, and only when it needs to. Eighty-five per cent of payments come through without a single complaint.

This is what collections should have looked like a decade ago. It just took someone outside the industry to build it.

What I believe

I believe the way Australian small businesses get paid is broken at a systemic level, and that fixing it is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for the economy.

I believe the current model — where a tradie finishes a job, sends an invoice, waits sixty days, then pays fifteen per cent to someone with a phone script to get their own money back — is absurd. And I believe most business owners know it's absurd. They've just never been given a better option.

I believe that if you automate the repetitive, uncomfortable, time-consuming parts of collecting what you're owed, you give small business owners back something more valuable than cash. You give them time. And certainty. And the headspace to focus on the work that actually matters.

That's what Chargetree does.

If you're running a small business in Australia, you shouldn't have to fight to get paid for work you've already done.

That's the problem. We're the fix.