When baker and business owner Will Jane arrives at work at 6am his crew is already on the job.
Ever prepared, the sourdough, pastries and doughnuts they've readied the day before go straight into the oven before being finished, packed and dispatched to wholesale customers in and around the Victorian coastal town of Warrnambool.
By 8am the deliveries are out the door, which then opens to Jane Dough's retail customers who Will and his bakers serve as they prepare the next day's delights.
On the surface, everything runs like clockwork.
But like many Australian small businesses facing tight margins, rising trading costs and a thin consumer spend, unpaid client invoices can tip the balance on the pages of even the savviest operator's ledger.
While Mr Jane has been lucky with his clients, post-pandemic price growth has prompted a noticeable lift in late payments, just as Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent certain bakery input costs skyrocketing up to 200 per cent.
"You could definitely notice people were paying slower; accounts receivables were going up," he tells AAP.
To make difficult matters worse, he was faced with the expense of moving his business to a new location.
"The bank account was getting low and at that point you're really chasing people to pay you because you can't pay your own bills," Mr Jane recalls.
"Definitely, I've been stressed. There's definitely a few grey hairs on the head I can attribute that to."
Like a loaf out of the oven, things have settled since the move and now Mr Jane keeps a rainy day buffer.
But plenty of operators didn't make it through 2022's post-pandemic inflation surge.
"I saw a lot of businesses in Warrnambool just give up because it was too hard," Mr Jane says.
Australian business insolvencies are at their highest levels since the early 1990s and are still 33 per cent higher than the last financial year despite plateauing in recent months, according to CreditorWatch.
Accommodation and food services businesses are under particular pressure, with one in 10 hospitality businesses closing in the year to June.
There have been signs of improvement in invoice payment defaults, which fell 6.5 per cent in June and are down roughly 25 per cent from December's peak.
"We'll continue to monitor for early signs of sustained recovery but the next six months will be critical for determining whether insolvency rates begin to fall or remain stubbornly high," says CreditorWatch chief executive Patrick Coghlan.
Despite recent easing, late payments and liquidity gaps continue to threaten the survival of small businesses, according to Joshua McNicol, head of growth at payments and services provider Zeller.
"Industry data shows that over $115 billion is owed in unpaid invoices to Australian small business operators, with invoices being paid, on average, 27 days past the due date," he tells AAP.
A lack of regulation around what constitutes a late payment has left small businesses to fend for themselves to chase payments, so Zeller is taking a technology-forward approach to tackle the issue.
"Nearly one in two business owners still invoice manually, whether that's via excel or handwritten, which leads to delays, errors and a longer time to payment," Mr McNicol says.
"Zeller's invoicing app tackles the problem of unpaid invoices ... by integrating invoicing, payments, cards and accounts into a single mobile app."
Invoices sent with embedded credit card gateways are paid significantly faster, with 70 per cent of them settled the day they are sent.
And Zeller isn't the only fintech narrowing its sights on the gap provided by legacy payment and accounting technology.
Buy-now pay-later provider Zip Co recently announced it was teaming up with payment provider Stripe and accounting software Xero to integrate Zip as a payment option directly on invoices to support liquidity and cash flow management.
"Small businesses get paid faster while offering their customers more flexible payment options, opening up new possibilities for growth," says Stripe's general manager for Australia and New Zealand Karl Durrance.
According to Xero data, around half of all payments to small businesses come in late.
Research by Sydney-based ScotPac Business Finance shows just one in five small and medium enterprises are confident they could survive the loss of a major client or supplier and that this uncertainty stems from cash flow-related issues.
Currently, the average time for Australian SMEs to receive payments is 35.4 days.
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