The Business Council of Australia fully supports policy measures to ensure Australia’s small businesses are paid within 30 days and supports a payment times reporting framework to help achieve this outcome. The Business Council wants to see much faster payment times to small business.

We recognise that cashflow is critical to the viability and success of small business. This not only gives small business payment certainty, it helps keep people in jobs throughout the supply chain.

The Business Council has, since 2017, adopted and promoted a 30-day maximum payment time to small business. We partnered with COSBOA and the State Government of Victoria to develop and launch the voluntary Australian Supplier Payment Code.

We strongly believe in fast payment times to small business, but three things need to be in place:

• A workable and accurate small business identification tool that will massively speed up the process for verifying small businesses and ensure all small businesses benefit from faster payment. The development of this tool needs to be expedited so that businesses can access it and prepare for the start date of 1 January 2021.
• Policies to support rapid digitisation of the small business community, so that small businesses can implement e-invoicing, which will reduce processing costs and errors and enable much faster payment times than 30 days.
• The government leading by example, by paying businesses promptly and on time, which feeds down the supply chain and enables better payment practices across the economy.

Read the full submission here