Cash flow guides for tradies, sole traders, and small service businesses

You finish the job. You send the invoice. And then… crickets. A week goes by. Two weeks. You tell yourself you'll chase it tomorrow. Three weeks later, you realize that $8,500 invoice still hasn't landed.

Chasing invoices shouldn't take you half an hour every time you open your laptop. The trick is having the words ready to go, then tweaking the details.

Saturday morning. Kids are at footy. You sit down with a coffee, open the laptop, and there it is – the folder of invoices that haven't been paid.

The invoice you send is the last thing your client sees of you. It's also the document that decides whether you get paid this week or next month.

Most tradies will write six follow-up emails before they'll pick up the phone. It's understandable. Emails feel safer.

At some point, the polite reminders stop working. The client isn't replying. Or they're replying with excuses. Or you're starting to feel like a mug for still being nice about it.

Every tradie has a story about the client from hell. The one who kept adding scope. The one who ghosted on the final invoice. The one who tried to haggle the price down after the job was done.

This is the story of Dave, a solo sparky running his own business out of West Auckland. At the start of February, Dave had $14,300 in overdue invoices sitting across 18 different jobs.

Ask a room full of tradies whether you can charge late payment fees and you'll get three answers: Yeah, of course; Not really; and My bookkeeper tried once and it was a mess.

Most tradies I know have two settings when it comes to chasing money. Setting one: they don't chase at all, and they lose thousands a year. Setting two: they chase hard, feel like a nuisance, and the relationship goes sideways.

Most sole traders don't go broke because their business is bad. They go broke because their cash flow is bad – which is a different thing.

Five years ago, it was normal for a tradie or small service business to wait 45-60 days for payment. Today, the best-run small businesses in NZ and AU are getting paid in 10-14.