Cash Flow for Tradies: The Four Numbers to Check Every Friday

Plenty of Australian trade businesses are flat out and still short of money at the end of the month. The vans are on the road, the phone rings, the jobs get done — and then BAS lands, a supplier account falls due, and there's nothing in the account to cover it. That's not a work problem. It's a cash flow problem, and the two are very different things.

Profit is what you earn on paper. Cash flow is what's actually in the bank when the bill arrives. A trade business can be profitable and still go under waiting for money that's been earned but not collected. The good news is that you don't need an accounting degree to stay on top of it. You need four numbers and ten minutes every Friday afternoon.

1. Money owed to you (and how old it is)

This is your debtors figure — every invoice you've sent that hasn't been paid. The total matters, but the age matters more. Split it into three buckets: under 14 days, 14–30 days, and over 30 days.

Anything sitting in that third bucket is the warning light. Debt gets harder to collect the older it gets: a fortnight overdue is a forgotten email, but ninety days overdue is often a customer who has decided not to pay. If your over-30 bucket is growing week on week, you don't have a busy month coming — you have a collection problem.

The fix is boring and it works: invoice the day the job is finished, not the weekend you finally sit down at the laptop. Then let automated reminders do the chasing at day 3, day 7 and day 14 so you're not the one making the awkward phone call. Systems built for trades — like the tools at Kabooyaa — send those reminders without you touching them.

2. Money you owe

Suppliers, subbies, equipment finance, insurance, the ATO. Write the total down along with the dates each one falls due over the next 30 days.

Most tradies carry this in their head, which works right up until it doesn't. Seeing it on one line next to your debtors figure tells you something useful in about five seconds: are you waiting on more than you owe, or less? If you owe $18,000 over the next month and you're owed $9,000, you already know this week's priority is collecting, not quoting.

3. Work quoted but not yet won

Your quote pipeline is your future cash. Track the dollar value of quotes sitting out there unanswered, and how long each has been unanswered.

Two things usually show up here. First, quotes go stale fast — a quote that's been silent for three weeks is a job you've already lost, you just haven't admitted it. Second, most tradies never follow up more than once. A single "just checking in" message a few days after sending a quote converts a surprising number of maybes into jobs, and it costs nothing but the reminder to send it.

Add up your live quotes each Friday. If that number is shrinking three weeks in a row, your quiet month is already booked in — and you've got time to do something about it now rather than panic later.

4. Cash actually in the account

The simplest number and the one people avoid. Write down the bank balance and, next to it, the balance you need to survive a slow fortnight — wages, fuel, rent, the minimum supplier payments. That gap is your buffer.

A useful target for a small trade business is four to six weeks of fixed costs sitting in a separate account you don't touch. Most tradies start well below that. Knowing the gap is the point: you can't close a number you've never measured.

Make it a ten-minute habit

Same time every week, ideally Friday afternoon before you knock off:

• Open your debtors list and check the over-30 bucket
• Check what's due to go out in the next 30 days
• Total your live quotes and flag anything older than a week for a follow-up
• Write down the bank balance and compare it to last Friday's

Four numbers, written in the same place each week. After a month you'll spot patterns you can't see day to day — that a certain customer always pays late, that quotes over a certain value need a phone call not an email, that February is thinner than you remembered.

Where software actually helps

None of this needs to be manual. If your quotes, invoices and customer records live in one place, three of the four numbers are already sitting on a dashboard. Invoices go out from the job site, payment reminders fire automatically, and quote follow-ups happen whether or not you remember them.

That's the whole idea behind a trades-focused CRM: not more admin, but less. The admin still gets done — it just doesn't get done by you at 9pm on a Sunday.

Want the four numbers on one screen instead of four different apps? Have a look at how Kabooyaa handles quoting, invoicing and automatic payment follow-up for Australian trade businesses — then book a quick walkthrough at www.kabooyaa.com and see it running with your own numbers.