Angad Zoin

Alice, a pleasure to be here.

Thanks for having us on such an important topic.

Important to reflect on what was.

So as you said, in our December quarter, when we run XSBI, zero small business insights, we saw that sales were up close to 7%, jobs over 3%, close to 4%.

Payment times were down to 24 days and late payments were also down to 6.6 days, which is the fastest on record, which is a great thing.

But at the end of the day, small businesses are still being paid one week late, which is kind of crazy in this day and age.

And so when you now fast forward to today, today's economic climate and with the change coming on July 1 around payday super, employees are going to have to start paying their employees super at the same time they pay them for their wages.

So that's a big shift.

Different businesses paid them weekly, fortnightly, monthly, but super used to be paid quarterly.

And so now they have to take that cash flow and space it out as per their normal wage cycle.

And so what we're really seeing is that small business owners are feeling that pressure on how are they going to smooth out their cash flow.

It's important to know that our research shows that small business owners actually want this.

So they see this as a great win for their employees.

But what we are seeing is that support for the legislation is different to how they're feeling on the ground in the reality of are they ready to manage this cash flow.

It's the timing of that cash flow I think is the biggest thing because ultimately, as a small business, you always paid super to your employees.

That was always happening.

But it was happening in that quarterly payment cycle.

And now when that shifts, most businesses need to think about how is that going to impact their day-to-day spending, what they thought they were going to be able to invest in this month or the next month.

accounting for these additional super payments at the time that they're coming.

Unfortunately, we do see that over 80 percent of small businesses think they're going to have to delay or reduce investment to be able to smooth out their cash flow.