Payday super quietly removed a cash buffer you were using without noticing

The Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Act 2025 took effect on 1 July 2026. Super now has to be paid at the same time as wages, and it has to be received by the employee's fund within 7 business days of payday. Not accrued, not scheduled. Received.

Most of the commentary has treated this as a payroll administration story: new deadlines, new penalties, check your software. That part is real and your accountant has probably already raised it. But for anyone with a decent-sized wages bill, the more consequential change is to cash, and it is the part that has had the least attention.

The buffer nobody called a buffer

Under the old rules, super accrued on every pay run but only had to be paid quarterly, by the 28th day after the quarter closed. That gap was, in practical terms, an interest-free line of credit sitting inside your bank account. Very few businesses thought of it that way. Plenty of them were using it.

Nothing about that was improper. It was simply how the timing worked, and a lot of ordinary businesses smoothed a lot of ordinary weeks with it. What matters now is that the smoothing has stopped, permanently, and the businesses that felt it first are the ones where wages are the biggest number on the P&L.

Money out got faster. Money in did not.

This is the whole problem in one sentence. Your outgoings just moved from quarterly to every pay run. Your incomings still arrive whenever your customers feel like paying, which in Australia means later than the terms you agreed: 48% of invoices are paid late, and late payment costs Australian small business roughly $1.1bn a year.

A gap that was survivable when it was measured against a quarterly obligation is a different thing measured against a weekly one. You have not lost any revenue. You have lost the slack that hid the timing.

There are only three ways to absorb it

1. Borrow. An overdraft or invoice finance bridges the gap. It works, and it costs you interest forever on a problem that is really about timing.
2. Hold more cash. Keep a bigger buffer so the weekly outflow never bites. Also works, and it means capital sitting idle instead of in the business.
3. Get paid closer to on time. Costs nothing, because the money is already yours and already invoiced. It is the only one of the three that improves the position rather than financing it.

What "closer to on time" is worth

You do not need to collect everything faster. Pulling your average collection in by a week or two is usually enough to cover a weekly super outflow, because you are not trying to fund the obligation, only to stop the timing mismatch compounding.

The invoices that move that number are rarely the disputed ones. They are the ordinary overdue invoices that have had two or three automated reminders and no phone call, sitting in the ledger because nobody had a spare afternoon. Xero will send the reminders. It cannot make the call that follows them.

If you advise other businesses on this

Every client with employees is asking the same question this quarter, and the honest answer is one of the three above. Two of them cost the client money. The third is the one you would rather recommend, and it is also the one that has always been hardest to actually deliver, because "chase your debtors properly" is advice, not a service you can hand over.

That is the gap worth thinking about now rather than in October, when the first full quarter under the new rules has been through everyone's books and the cash position is a conversation instead of a forecast.

Office Voice phones your overdue customers off live Xero data, has a real conversation, texts a secure pay-link, and stops the moment Xero marks the invoice paid. If your clients bill progressively, read the ledger split first, because on those books the overdue column is several different things and only one of them should be chased.

See it on your own Xero

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