What does accounts receivable automation cost in Australia?

1. The more you hand over, the more it costs

There is no single price for accounts receivable automation, because the phrase covers six different things. They form a ladder, and each step up hands over more of the chasing and costs more.

1. Xero’s own reminders. Emails on a schedule. No separate charge.
2. An email and SMS chasing app. Smarter schedules, texts, payment links, a dashboard. A monthly fee that grows with your invoice count.
3. A late-fee and interest app. Adds the fee your terms allow and posts it to the ledger. Often the same app as step two.
4. Done-for-you phone chasing. Someone, or something, actually rings the customer. Dearer, and the only step that gets an answer out of a customer who ignores email.
5. A credit controller or bookkeeper hours. A person on your payroll or your bookkeeper’s invoice.
6. A collections agency. No monthly fee, a share of what it recovers, and the end of the relationship with that customer in most cases.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease: the customer who hears from you most often tends to get paid first. Every step on the ladder is a way of making your wheel squeak without you doing the squeaking. The question is how loud it needs to be, and what that is worth. If you want the wider picture of what the automation actually does, start with the accounts receivable automation paper.

2. What Xero already does for free

Xero’s own invoicing page says reminders are sent for you automatically, before and after the due date, and weekly until paid. We could find no separate charge for them. They come with the Xero subscription you already pay, which Xero prices in AUD including GST.

For a business with a modest number of invoices and customers who mostly pay, that is enough, and nothing further up this page is worth buying until you have switched it on and watched it run for a couple of months.

Where it runs out: it sends emails, and it stops there. It does not text, does not ring, does not add late fees, and does not notice that the customer replied “paid Friday” and then did not. We compare it with the paid apps line by line in Xero invoice reminders or a debtor chasing app.

3. What the chasing apps publish

Read from each vendor’s own pricing page, checked October 2026. Prices are shown in the currency and on the tax basis the vendor states. Where a vendor states no tax basis, we say so rather than guess.

Three things stand out once they sit side by side.

The price follows your invoice count, not your overdue count. Paidnice prices by invoices a month. A business that sends a lot of small invoices pays more than one that sends a few large ones, even if the second has the worse debtor problem.

Late fees are a feature, not always a separate product. Paidnice describes adding the fee or interest your terms allow, posting it to your ledger and telling the customer, with an option to hold each fee for your approval. It is only worth paying for if your terms of trade allow it and you are prepared to enforce it.

Two of the better-known names publish no price at all. That is common at the larger end and not a trick, but it means the first conversation is a sales call, and the first question to ask is whether there is a setup fee. For a fuller comparison of what each app does, see debtor chasing apps for Xero in Australia.

4. When somebody needs to pick up the phone

Emails and texts work on customers who meant to pay and forgot. They do very little for the customer who has decided to wait you out. That customer tends to get paid last because nobody rings them, and the call is the job most owners and bookkeepers put off.

Two published prices exist for having it done. Chaser sells its Care add-on, a dedicated AR specialist who makes payment follow-ups and phone calls and handles disputes, in bundles starting at AUD 1,799 a month for Compact plus Care. The page does not state a tax basis.

The other is our own product, Office Voice, which places the call with an AI voice agent against your live Xero ledger. Its price and what it does and does not do are in section 10, with the disclosure first, because a paper comparing prices should not hide which row is ours.

5. Paying a person to chase

SEEK’s credit controller salary page, dated October 2026, lists an average of $85,000 a year in Brisbane and several other locations. SEEK says this is based on full-time salary ranges disclosed by employers in its job ads, and that some of those include super and some do not.

Few small businesses need a full-time credit controller. The real comparison is a few hours a week, either from someone already on staff or from your bookkeeper. That cost is easy to miss because it never arrives as an invoice labelled “chasing”. It shows up as a bookkeeper’s hours creeping up, or as the owner doing it at night.

A person does things no app does: knows the customer, reads the excuse, agrees a payment plan, decides when to stop being polite. Section 8 shows how to put a number on their hours so you can compare it with the rest of the ladder.

6. Handing it to a collector

A collections agency charges nothing monthly and takes a commission on what it recovers. Two published examples:

• CreditorWatch Collect. Its engagement form publishes a fee schedule that falls as the debt grows: 35% plus GST on debts of $500 to $1,000, 20% plus GST on $1,001 to $5,000, 15% plus GST on $5,001 to $20,000, 10% plus GST on $20,001 to $50,000, 7.5% plus GST on $50,001 to $100,000, and 5% plus GST above that. Legal action needs a separate authority because costs are involved.
• EC Credit Control. Its debt collection page states no collection, no commission, a $60 plus GST fee to load each debt, then 25% of the first $10,000 collected, 15% of the next $10,000 and 5% above $20,000, all ex GST. It loads overdue invoices straight from Xero.

Our arithmetic on the first schedule, not a figure of theirs: a $3,000 debt sits in the 20% band, so if the band rate applies to the whole amount, about $600 plus GST of it goes to the agency. The form does not spell out how the bands apply, so ask.

An agency is the right tool for a debt that has stopped being a conversation. It is the wrong tool for a good customer who is merely slow, because the letter tends to end the relationship along with the debt. We cover that decision in the debt collection paper.

7. The costs under the price

Every option above has a second number underneath the first. These are the ones to ask about before you sign.

• Charges per text. Paidnice charges AUD 0.15 for each SMS, with an option to cap sending in the app. Texts work well, which is exactly why the line grows. Multiply by your overdue invoices and the reminders each one gets.
• A price for each company file. Paidnice’s plans cover one Xero organisation; each extra entity on Pro is AUD 39 a month. If you run a trading company and a separate entity, or you are a bookkeeper with a client book, this line decides the bill.
• Setup and onboarding fees. Not shown on the pages that publish prices, and unknown on the ones that do not. Chaser lists assisted onboarding as a feature without a price. Ask every vendor for the all-in first-year figure, setup included.
• Yearly versus monthly. Chaser shows a lower monthly figure when billed yearly. That is a fair discount, and also twelve months of commitment before you know whether your customers respond to it.
• Commission plus GST. Agency rates are a share of the money you were owed, with GST on top where stated, and legal costs on top of that if it goes further.
• Your own time. No app removes it entirely. Someone still reads replies, handles disputes and decides when a customer goes on hold. The useful question is how many hours a week are left after the tool is running, not whether the tool is “automatic”.

8. What one slow payer is costing you

You do not need an industry average for this, and you should be wary of anyone who gives you one. You need three numbers from your own books.

1. The cost of the cash tied up. Amount owed × days paid late ÷ 365 × your yearly cost of money. Use your overdraft or business loan rate, because that is what you pay to cover the gap.
2. The cost of chasing it. Hours a week spent chasing × what an hour of that person’s time costs you. If it is your own time, use what you would charge a customer for it.
3. The chance it never comes. Look at what you wrote off last year. That figure, divided by twelve, is a monthly cost you are already paying.

Notice what the hypothetical shows. The interest on one late invoice is small. If that were the whole cost, no chasing tool would be worth buying. The case for paying rests on the other lines: how many invoices are late at the same time, how much of somebody’s week disappears into chasing, and the invoices that are never paid at all.

Then do the same sum for each option you are considering: monthly fee, plus texts at your volume, plus extra company files, plus any setup fee divided by twelve, plus the hours somebody still spends. Whichever one leaves the biggest gap between the two totals is the one to try first.

9. When it isn’t worth paying for

• Your customers mostly pay. If Xero’s reminders are on and the overdue list is short, a paid app is buying a nicer dashboard. Keep the money.
• The problem is one customer. Ring them. A subscription to solve one relationship is a sledgehammer for a walnut.
• The invoices are wrong. If customers are not paying because the invoice went to the wrong person, missed the purchase order number, or did not match the quote, chasing harder makes it worse. Fix what goes out first.
• The debt has gone quiet for months. Software and polite calls are for customers still talking to you. A customer who has stopped answering needs a collector or a lawyer.
• Nobody will act on what it raises. Every tool on this page hands something back: a dispute, a promise that was broken, a customer to put on stop. If nobody picks those up, the tool chases politely while the problem sits there.
• Your terms do not allow late fees. A late-fee app adds little until your terms of trade say a fee or interest applies and your customers have agreed to them.

10. What we charge, and who we are

Disclosure first. Office Voice is our own product: AI Pathway builds and runs it. This paper compares it with businesses we compete with, so read this section knowing that.

The overdue-invoice calling is sold as Recover on Office Voice. On our pricing page it is the Get Paid insert, $199 per month ex GST, with a 30-day free trial and $29 to set up your number, which comes off your first bill. A higher tier adds more volume and control, and practices running a client book get wholesale rates that scale with the book.

No call caps and no per-minute overage. There is no call allowance to run out of, because our billing does not meter calls or minutes. The monthly figure is the figure, including in the month half your customers are late at once.

What the price buys is the step most tools leave to you: a real phone call to the overdue customer, the balance read from your live Xero ledger, a payment link sent during the call, a promise to pay recorded as a date, and disputes raised to you rather than chased. You manage the exceptions it brings back; it works the rest of the list.

The concession: it costs more than the entry email apps in section 3, and it is not worth that if your customers respond to email. It earns its place when someone in your business is ringing debtors today, or should be and is not.

Technical? The build standard is open. Take it.

11. Sources and method

Every vendor figure on this page was read from that vendor’s own public page on 23 October 2026 and is reproduced as advertised, in the currency and on the tax basis the vendor states. No vendor was contacted and none has reviewed this page.

Where a vendor publishes no price, the page says “not published, quote only” rather than borrowing a figure from a review site. Debtor Daddy’s pricing address now forwards to CreditorWatch Collect, so it appears under that name. The salary figure is SEEK’s, from its credit controller salary page, and the agency rates are from each agency’s own site. The worked example in section 8 is a labelled hypothetical, not data.

Prices in this market change without notice. Treat this page as a method for comparing quotes, re-check each vendor’s page before you decide, and tell us if a figure here has gone out of date so we can correct it.