Australian freight businesses are feeling this pressure directly. According to CreditorWatch’s April 2026 Business Risk Index, late payments across Australian businesses are now at their highest level since January 2020. The report frames late payments as an early indicator of financial stress, one that shows up before it’s reflected in the formal insolvency data.
What the data actually shows
CreditorWatch’s findings point to a few things happening at once: higher interest rates are pushing up the cost of debt, inflation and energy prices are adding to everyday expenses, and softer consumer demand is making it harder for businesses to pass those costs along. Together, that’s leaving less breathing room in day-to-day cash flow, and freight is one of the industries feeling it most.
The Transport, Postal and Warehousing industry recorded one of the highest rates of invoices sitting more than 60 days overdue, at 7.09%, alongside a 1.24% rolling annual insolvency rate, one of the higher figures across the industries CreditorWatch tracks.
Data Source: CreditorWatch Business Risk Index, rate of 60+ arrears by industry, 12 months to April 2025.
Why freight is exposed to this particular pressure
Transport and logistics businesses tend to run on thinner margins than most industries, and they’re more exposed to input costs, fuel, labor, equipment, that move independently of what they can charge customers.
But it’s worth being precise about where the 60-plus days are actually going. Even in a slower-than-ideal case, settlement itself doesn’t take two months. Payments in Australia typically settle within a business day or two, and when vendors have guaranteed funds behind a payment, that friction is reduced even further. So where do the other 58 or 59 days actually go? The delay isn’t happening at the point of transfer. It’s happening before the payment is ever authorized.
Where the delay is actually coming from
A meaningful share of “late payment” isn’t a customer sitting on cash, it’s an invoice that never made it through internal approval in the first place. In freight specifically, that tends to come down to a few recurring issues:
- Invoices missing required documentation before they can be matched to a shipment
- GST amounts on freight invoices that are missing, incorrectly calculated, or don’t match a valid tax invoice
- Approval workflows that don’t reflect how the team actually operates, so invoices get routed to the wrong person or stall waiting on a sign-off nobody was expecting to give
- Charges that don’t match an existing accrual or contract, going unflagged until someone happens to catch the discrepancy manually
- Disputed charges handled over email and spreadsheets, with no clear record of where a dispute stands or who’s responsible for resolving it
None of these are customer behavior problems. They’re internal workflow problems, and they compound as invoice volume grows.
How forwarders are closing the internal gap
The bottleneck for most freight businesses isn’t moving money, it’s everything that happens before approval: matching an invoice to a shipment, validating the charges, getting it signed off.
A few patterns are showing up in how forwarders are closing that gap:
- Approval flows built for logistics, not generic finance software. Roles, approval routing, and document handling are set up to match how a freight team actually operates, rather than forcing operations to adapt to a finance tool.
- Reconciliation against accruals and contract terms, automatically. Invoices are matched against accrual data and contracted rates the moment they arrive (including GST treatment and valid tax-invoice requirements), instead of someone manually checking a rate sheet against a bill.
- Exceptions flagged and routed automatically. Exceptions are flagged immediately and routed to the right person for review and approval, so the approved cost moves straight into the TMS rather than sitting in a manual queue.
- Disputes handled in one place. Rather than disputes living in scattered email threads, they’re managed end-to-end, with document attachments and status visibility, so nothing sits unresolved because no one remembers whose turn it is to respond.
- Straight-through processing at scale. One global freight forwarder PayCargo works with, operating across 20+ countries and more than 14,000 customers, had a 40-person finance team dedicated entirely to manual invoice reconciliation. After implementing PayCargo’s AP Automation, 80% of invoices now clear for payment automatically, freeing that team from manual reconciliation without adding headcount as volume grew.
For freight teams already managing thin margins and rising input costs, removing the internal delay is one of the few levers fully within their control.
The bigger picture
A six-year high in late payments isn’t going to resolve itself through better customer relationships alone. For Australian freight businesses, it’s a structural signal that cash is moving too slowly through the system, and every day an invoice sits unresolved is a day of working capital they don’t have access to.
Fixing that doesn’t require rebuilding how a business operates. It usually starts with automating the one step that’s been quietly slowing everything else down.
