It’s month-end in Perth. A batch of supplier bills is stuck waiting for approval, an approver can’t see what they should, and payments are due tomorrow. You open a support ticket at 10am.

If your software vendor is based in California, it’s around 7pm the evening before. The team has gone home. You’ll probably get a reply overnight, and if that reply asks a follow-up question, you’re looking at another full day before anything is fixed.

Most approval delays aren’t caused by bad people or bad intentions. They’re caused by the process. A bill sits for nine days, not because the approver disagreed with it, but because they didn’t know it was waiting, didn’t have enough information to decide, or were on leave.

The result is the same either way: late payments, unhappy suppliers, missed early-payment discounts, and a month-end close that drags.

Here’s how to fix it.

At some point every growing company hears the same advice: “You’ve outgrown Xero. Time to move to an ERP.”

Sometimes that’s true. Often it isn’t. An ERP project usually means six to twelve months of implementation, consultants, data migration, and retraining a team that already knows Xero well. For a lot of businesses with two to ten entities, that’s a big cost to solve a handful of specific problems.

It’s worth being clear about what those problems actually are.