It's the weekend before the BAS is due. The work was finished weeks ago and the invoices went out. Now you're sitting with the overdue list open, working out who to nudge and who to leave alone, writing the same polite email for the fourth time.
BAS gets the blame for that weekend. It shouldn't. The BAS is just a date. The real problem is the money that was supposed to be in the account by now.
The date that doesn't move
The quarterly BAS for July to September is due on 28 October if you lodge it yourself. If a registered BAS or tax agent lodges it for you, the ATO gives them a later date, so check yours with your bookkeeper.
Either way, the date doesn't care who has paid you. Depending on how your business accounts for it, you can owe the tax on an invoice before the customer has paid it. That's the squeeze. The bill is due on a fixed day, and the money arrives whenever your customers get around to it.
The same invoice, two ways
Take one ordinary invoice. You finish a job in early September and send the invoice that afternoon. The customer is a good one. They always pay, they're just busy.
You mean to send a reminder when it goes overdue. Then a job runs over, the phone goes off, and the reminder slides to next week. By the time you remember, chasing feels a bit awkward, so you leave it. The invoice is still unpaid when BAS week arrives, and all the chasing happens at once, on a weekend, in a hurry. Every customer gets the same email, the reliable one and the one who has been late four times.
The invoice goes overdue and a reminder goes out, matched to the customer. For your good payer it's a gentle nudge, the kind you'd send yourself if you had a spare minute. It keeps going on a schedule until the invoice is paid. For the customer who makes a habit of being late, the reminders are firmer. By BAS week the chasing has been happening all quarter, not crammed into one weekend.
What this doesn't do
It won't make a customer pay who can't. It won't fix an invoice that went out wrong or late. And it doesn't replace the conversation you'd have with someone who's genuinely in trouble. That one stays with you, and we've written about the jobs we'd tell you to keep human even though it's technically possible to hand them off.
What it takes off your plate is the reminding: remembering who's late, working out the right tone for each customer, and actually sending it. It's one of nine systems, each built to do one job properly.
A five-minute check before the 28th
- Open your overdue list. Count the invoices that are more than a fortnight late.
- Next to each one, note who has actually chased it. Not who meant to. Who did.
- Look at the pattern. If most of them are just sitting there, that's where your weekends are going, and it's a job that shouldn't be yours.
If chasing invoices is eating your weekends, that's exactly the kind of thing a free discovery call is for. We'll look at your actual week and tell you honestly whether it's worth handing over.