43% of supplier invoices are dated in the first seven days of the month, against 23% if dates were spread evenly. 13.6% of emailed invoices arrive more than a week late, and 32.6% of customer-supplier relationships send invoices only through a portal.
When supplier invoices are dated
Share of supplier invoices
Days 1 to 7
The 1st of the month
Dec 2025 to Oct 2026.
If dates were spread evenly across the month, about 23% of supplier invoices would fall on days 1 to 7, and about 3.3% on the 1st. Here, 43% are dated in that first week, and 10.6% on the 1st.
If you do your own monthly bookkeeping, that first week is when the pile arrives. The 1st is the busiest single day, so the documents are already stacked up before you sit down with the books.
How late emailed invoices arrive
Share of emailed invoices
Same day
More than 7 days late
More than 30 days late
29% of accounts got at least one invoice more than a week late
Shares overlap. More than 30 days late is also more than 7 days late.
Dec 2025 to Oct 2026.
66.6% of emailed invoices reach the inbox on the same day as the invoice date. 13.6% arrive more than 7 days later, and 6.0% more than 30 days later. 29% of accounts got at least one invoice more than a week late.
Same-day invoices are easy to file if they land in the inbox you already check. The late ones are the gap: the supplier has issued the invoice, and it is still not in front of you when you do the monthly bookkeeping.
Those late shares overlap. An invoice more than 30 days late is also counted in the more than 7 days share.
Portal-only supplier relationships
Share of customer-supplier relationships
Invoices only through a portal, never by email
Dec 2025 to Oct 2026.
32.6% of customer-supplier relationships send invoices only through a supplier portal, never by email. Searching the inbox will not find those documents.
If you do your own monthly bookkeeping, each portal is another login. Miss one and the books are short, even when the inbox looks complete.
The aggregate numbers and the charts on this page are free to use. Credit them with a link to booksmate.com/statistics.
These figures are anonymised supplier invoices processed by Booksmate customers, December 2025 to October 2026. They are not a survey. Test and internal accounts are excluded.
Dates are the invoice dates extracted from the documents. Delivery delay compares that date with the day the email arrived in the inbox. Shares that would identify a small group are left out.
Most small businesses get a pile of invoices in the first week of the month, and one in seven still turns up more than a week late. If you're chasing them by hand, your books are always a step behind.
If you do your own monthly bookkeeping, Booksmate can extract invoice data and download invoices automatically from vendor portals and email.
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