At a glance
Share of Australia Post Express Post consignments addressed inside the Next Business Day Network that were delivered on or before the next business day after lodgement. Australia Post publishes a delivery guarantee for Express Post between eligible postcodes: a miss makes the consignment eligible for an automatic postage refund. This card is your contractual performance score against that guarantee, and the early-warning gauge for refund exposure.
Calculation
For every Express Post consignment whose from/to postcode pair is inside the Next Business Day Network, the card computes a target delivery date: the next Australia Post business day after the lodgement scan. It then compares the delivered scan against that target. On or before target scores as on time; after target, or no delivered scan once the target has passed, scores as a miss. Three things shape the reading:- Lodgement, not label print, starts the clock. Australia Post’s guarantee runs from when the parcel enters the network (the lodgement / first acceptance scan), not from when you printed the label in your warehouse. A parcel that sits on the despatch bench for a day before lodgement does not consume guarantee time; that gap is a fulfilment issue, visible on Orders with Carrier Dispatch SLA Missed.
- Business days, with state holidays. The next-business-day target skips weekends and the destination state’s public holidays. This is why the card and a naive “delivered within 24 hours” calculation disagree around long weekends.
- Eligibility is the gate. Only network-eligible consignments are scored. A drop on Express Post Address-Eligibility Rate changes which parcels are in this denominator, so always read the two cards together.
Worked example
The same Australian DTC supplements brand, fulfilling from Mascot, NSW (2020), sending around 2,300 Express Post consignments in the trailing 30 days. Reading taken at 09:00 AEST on 14 Apr 26 for the window 16 Mar 26 to 14 Apr 26. Eligible consignments only.
The card reads 96.0 percent on the gauge; the alert at
<95% is not tripped at the aggregate. Five things to notice:
- The aggregate hides a Perth problem. Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane are comfortably above the floor. Perth at 84.3 percent is the lane dragging the tail. The 22 missed Perth consignments are each refund-eligible. Pair with OTD by Route to confirm the concentration before you escalate.
- Every miss is money you can claim back. 91 missed consignments at an Express Post postage of roughly AUD 11 to AUD 16 each is AUD 1,000 to AUD 1,450 of refundable postage this month, if you file. Most merchants never claim it. Surface the individual misses through Express Post SLA Breach (refund-clause trigger) and file in batch.
- Check lodgement timing before blaming the network. If the misses cluster on consignments lodged after the last metro acceptance cut-off, the parcel started its guarantee a day late and the network never had a chance. That is a despatch-cut-off problem, not an Australia Post problem; confirm against Orders with Carrier Dispatch SLA Missed.
- Long weekends move the number. During an Easter or state-holiday week the next-business-day target jumps a day for the affected state, and the card correctly counts that. Do not over-read a single quiet-week reading; use the 30-day rolling view.
- Eligibility sets the ceiling. If Express Post Address-Eligibility Rate fell this period, the mix of eligible parcels shifted, which can move this number even when per-lane performance is flat. Read eligibility first.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Guaranteed-OTD is a contractual performance score. Pair it with these to find cause and recover cost:Reconciling against the source
Where to look in Australia Post’s own tooling: Article-level delivery timing comes from the Australia Post tracking portal and, for account holders, the MyPost Business and Australia Post Merchant Portal consignment views, which show the lodgement and delivered scans per article. The same scans are exposed through the Shipping & Tracking API tracking-events endpoint. The guaranteed-network membership behind eligibility comes from the Express Post coverage / delivery-estimate response. The closest like-for-like check is to pull a sample of consignments flagged late by this card, open each article in the tracking portal, and confirm the delivered scan date is after the next business day from the lodgement scan. Why our number may legitimately differ from Australia Post’s view:
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
My OTD looks fine but customers say their Express parcel was late. Why the gap? Two usual reasons. (1) The clock starts at lodgement, not order. If a parcel sat on your despatch bench overnight, the customer experienced two days even though the carrier delivered in one business day from lodgement. Check Orders with Carrier Dispatch SLA Missed. (2) Eligibility. The customer may have been outside the Next Business Day Network, so their parcel was never under the guarantee even though you charged Express. Check Express Post Address-Eligibility Rate. How do I actually claim the refunds for the misses? Australia Post’s Express Post guarantee is a postage refund on qualifying misses, claimed through your account. The practical workflow is to use Express Post SLA Breach (refund-clause trigger) to get the article IDs and lodgement / delivered scans, then submit the claim batch through MyPost Business or your account manager. Claim promptly; older misses are harder to substantiate. Why does a parcel delivered “the day after tomorrow” sometimes still count as on time? Business days and public holidays. A parcel lodged on the Friday before a state public-holiday Monday has a next-business-day target of the Tuesday. Delivery on Tuesday is on time even though three calendar days passed. The card applies the destination state’s holiday calendar, which is why it sometimes disagrees with a naive 24-hour rule. Perth always drags my number down. Is that an Australia Post failure? Not necessarily. Cross-continent metro lanes sit at the edge of the next-business-day window and are the most sensitive to a single missed flight or sortation delay. Use OTD by Route to see whether Perth is structurally lower (expected) or has stepped down recently (a network incident worth raising). What is a healthy number? For a metro-skewed eastern-seaboard sender, 96 to 99 percent is normal. The alert at<95% is the level where the count of refund-eligible misses becomes material to claim and worth a conversation with your account manager. Sustained readings below 90 percent point to a real network or lodgement-timing problem.
Does the card count a parcel with no delivered scan as late?
Once its next-business-day target has passed with no delivered scan, yes, it is treated as a miss, consistent with how the portal would show it. If a delivered scan later arrives through the tracking feed, the reading corrects on the next refresh.