Tailem Bend Netball Club had finally resurfaced its courts. Volunteer quiz nights and community raffles had helped raise the cash.
The club paid the invoice and believed the project was finished. Then the contractor called to ask where the money was.
About $150,000 had vanished. Scammers had intercepted the email chain, swapped in their own bank details and walked away with the money.
That gap between sending an invoice and safely getting paid is what founder Robin Sands and his startup Link4 have spent the past decade trying to close.
The ordinary invoice carries hidden risk
The process looks innocent enough. A business creates an invoice in its accounting software, saves it as a PDF, attaches it to an email, and sends it to the customer.
On the other side, someone reads the PDF, enters the details into their own accounting system, sends it for approval and makes the payment.
Every handover creates room for error. A number gets typed incorrectly. An approval sits unnoticed in an inbox. And in that chain, a scammer finds their opening and steals your money.
Robin has spoken about invoice scams for years. At events, he used to ask audiences who had heard of invoice fraud. Most hands would go up. Then he would ask who had been affected by it, and enough hands would stay in the air to make the room uncomfortable.
“Out of six people,” Robin says, “five of them have heard about the invoice scam, and one of those five has been affected by it.”
He eventually stopped asking people to raise their hands, because victims often felt embarrassed. To Robin, that shame was misplaced.
“It’s not really their fault,” he says. “It’s just that the bad guys are getting better.”
Robin saw a small-business problem through a big-business lens
For most of his career, Robin worked in marketing for large international companies.
He had seen what good systems could do: information moved from one program to another without anybody copying it by hand and making mistakes.
But small businesses, he knew, were different. They were still sending PDFs through email and hoping everything landed safely.
“The question was how could some of those big business practices and processes be applied to small business,” Robin says.
By the mid-2010s, many businesses were already using cloud accounting platforms such as Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks.
Robin figured those systems should be able to send invoice data directly to each other, without a PDF sitting in the middle.
You don’t solve a big problem alone
If Robin was going to bring eInvoicing to the masses, he needed a co-founder, and he knew who he wanted.
Robin first crossed paths with Sam Hassan in 2012 through a shared software tool.
At the time, Robin was working at a web design company in Adelaide, while Sam was running his own web business in Egypt.
When Sam later moved to Australia, Robin’s team hired him. Then, when Robin was recruited into another software company, he brought Sam with him.
By the time they launched Link4 in 2016, they already knew how to work together.
“He takes the technology part, I take the commercial part,” Robin says.
A startup that links together systems
Link4 is a tool that helps accounting systems talk to each other.
A business still creates an invoice the normal way, using Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks or another accounting program.
But instead of turning that invoice into a PDF and sending it by email, Link4 sends the invoice information safely and directly into the customer’s accounting system.
For example, a plumber using MYOB can send an invoice straight into a construction company’s Xero account, where it appears automatically in “Bills to Pay” ready for approval and payment.
Robin says that Australian federal government agencies are now set up to receive eInvoices, which means small business suppliers get paid much faster.
“You can invoice them at the beginning of the week and have the money in the bank by the end of the week,” Robin says.
For a small supplier watching cash flow closely, that speed can make a real difference. Money that arrives sooner can be spent sooner: on wages, bills, stock, rent or the next piece of work.
The Australian Taxation Office has also estimated that if just 15 per cent of businesses used eInvoicing, Australia’s economy would be around $3 billion better off each year.
The early years were a fight to stay afloat
From the outside, a simple product idea can look inevitable once it starts working. From the inside, Link4’s early years felt far less certain.
“The first six years,” Robin says, “were very heavy dog paddling, trying to survive.”
While the team worked hard, Robin is also honest about the role timing played.
“We know a guy who tried to do it five years earlier,” Robin says. “But cloud accounting systems weren’t common then. They weren’t able to talk to each other. We just came in at the right time. If we’d gone five years later, someone else would have done it.”
One habit that helped was building structure early. Every Monday, Robin and Sam held a management meeting, just like a large company, even when the entire team was just the two of them.
“Sam and I were working side-by-side every day, but we’d still stop and have a Monday management meeting because that was the structure we wanted,” Robin says.
But over time, as new people joined and departments formed, the business grew into its structure. Today, that same leadership meeting now seats eight at the table.
“I’m really glad we set this up early,” Robin says. “If you’re not careful, it sneaks up on you.”
While the division of labour gave both Robin and Sam a clear focus, Robin is quick to note that the partnership worked best because they did not agree on everything.
“If you’re always agreeing on everything, you’re just going to end up supporting each other going off a cliff,” he says.
Going overseas gave Link4 room to survive
Another decision helped Link4 stay alive while Australia moved slowly: the company went international early.
“If we were just doing Australia, we wouldn’t have survived,” Robin says.
Australia can be slow to adopt new business technology, especially when the old way still appears to work. Robin notices the contrast most in markets where eInvoicing is already better understood or mandatory.
“In Malaysia, eInvoicing is mandated,” he says. “Someone says to me, ‘What do you do?’ I say, ‘eInvoicing.’ They go, ‘Oh, awesome. Tell us more.’ Whereas in Australia, people go, ‘What’s that? Is that even a real business?’”
By expanding into markets such as Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, Link4 gave itself room to grow while Australia caught up. That mix of countries also made the company more resilient.
“One country will have a good year and another one won’t,” Robin says. “It evens out in the long run.”
Link4 has watched competitors come and go. Robin believes the company has survived because it stays focused, going deeper in eInvoicing, while broader competitors spread themselves thin.
“We’re focused on a niche,” he says. “Some of our competitors do superstream, tax, compliance, and eInvoicing is just something they do on the side. For us, that’s all we do.”
Link4 has spent a decade solving the same narrow problem across different accounting systems and business structures. The company has also focused on Asia-Pacific, even when opportunities in other regions have looked tempting.
“Our competitors in the US and Europe told us, ‘As long as you stay focused in Asia-Pacific, you’ll be leaders,’” Robin says.
Saying yes to every opportunity can scatter a company’s attention. Link4 chose a clear region, a clear problem and a position it could hold for years.
“A lot of people find it hard to say no,” Robin says. “But if you can stay focused and know where you’re headed, it makes it easier.”
The hardest part of a tech business is people
“It could be a financial thing, it could be a culture impact, but the people part is probably one of the biggest challenges,” Robin says.
Someone with the wrong attitude can pull focus from the work, frustrate the people around them and change how the team feels day-to-day.
“You try your best to hire the right people,” Robin says, “but there’s always someone that sneaks through.”
That experience has changed how Robin now hires. Given the choice between a technically stronger candidate who risks disrupting the team and one who fits the culture, Robin says it's not a close call.
When you hire the people who make the culture better, it lifts the whole team.
“Some of the best things in business are the people that you hire, because they end up having the same passion and dedication as you, and you do well because of them,” Robin says.
Stone & Chalk helped them escape the founder bottleneck
Link4 reached a point where Robin and Sam were involved in almost every customer interaction, which limited their growth.
Robin put the challenge to Sam:
“What if a customer could come in, go through the whole process, and be live without you ever having to speak to them?” he asked.
Sam said it was not possible at the time.
“I know it’s not now,” Robin replied. “How do we make that possible?”
The answer came through conversations at Stone & Chalk with founders who had already faced similar problems. Robin could explain what was happening inside Link4, and someone nearby could recognise the pattern immediately.
“We go, ‘Here’s our situation,’ and they go, ‘Ah, everyone gets that. This is what you do,’” Robin says.
Robin remembers a founders circle where five or six founders at a similar stage would meet once a month and speak honestly about what was going wrong.
Instead of making every mistake alone, they could learn from people sitting nearby who had already stumbled, adjusted and kept going.
As Robin puts it, “Life’s too short to make all the mistakes yourself.”
Robin’s advice is about staying power
In the early days, Robin used to joke that after ten years they would be an overnight success.
“If you realise at the beginning how long it’s going to take, it’s going to scare you,” he says.
The word he keeps returning to is “sticktuitiveness’. It means staying in the ring when the money has thinned out, the early excitement has gone flat and quitting would be the rational choice.
Robin remembers judging an innovation competition where a young founder proudly said he had already started eight businesses and all of them had failed.
“When things get tough, you’ve got to find a way around it,” he says. “You can’t just move on to the next thing.”
Link4 is moving from survival to expansion
The company is now ten years old. Robin has offices in five countries, around 40 staff, and thousands of customers supported through the platform.
“Now we’ve got solid customers, solid staff, people celebrating four years with us, seven years,” Robin says. “We have a reputation. Now’s the time to build on it.”
The company is exploring AI invoice processing for the messier side of invoicing: unstructured PDFs and scanned documents that still need to be turned into usable data.
Link4 has also acquired the Singapore eInvoicing operations of Unifiedpost, strengthening its position in a market where eInvoicing is becoming mandatory for more businesses.
From here, the company plans to enter two or three new countries each year, with a focus on markets where regulation is pushing adoption forward.
A weak link hidden inside normal business
Most business processes are invisible until they break. Nobody questions how an invoice gets sent, until $150,000 ends up in the wrong bank account.
Robin Sands and Sam Hassan built Link4 to fix that increasingly visible problem. And while the PDF invoice continues to live, its days may be numbered.
