The calendar falls badly this year. Christmas Day is a Friday and Boxing Day a Saturday, so the substitute bank holiday lands on Monday 28 December. New Year's Day is a Friday too. Add the weekends either side and the natural break runs from Christmas Eve through to Monday 4 January, with one awkward working…
read moreThis morning the RAC confirmed that the average price of diesel on UK forecourts has reached 200.01p a litre. It is the first time the national average has gone above £2, and it is not a one day blip. Diesel is up by roughly 35% since February. The RAC attributes the rise to conflict in…
read moreA subcontractor who has worked for you for six years asks, politely, when he is going to be paid. You know the answer and you would rather not say it out loud, because it depends on a valuation being certified by somebody you have never met. This is the ordinary shape of construction. You pay…
read moreThe call tends to come on a Wednesday or a Thursday. A customer who has always paid on time has not paid this month. Nobody at their end is returning calls, the person who signs things is on leave, and payroll runs on Friday. Nothing about the business has gone wrong. The work was done,…
read moreConsider a groundworks contractor who loses the best part of a month to rain. The site floods, dries out just enough to restart, then floods again, and the pattern holds for weeks. It is not a rare story, and it is not confined to groundworks. Bricklaying, scaffolding, roofing and concreting stop for the same reasons,…
read moreThe out-of-office replies have stopped. Emails sent in the middle of August are finally being answered, the diary is filling up, and quotes that went quiet in July are suddenly live again. For any business that invoices other businesses on credit terms, this is the point at which the year starts moving again. It is…
read moreA broker said something to us this week that is worth addressing head on. Talking about selective invoice finance, he said: it is the same as a loan, really. It is not, and the difference is not a technicality. But it is a fair thing to think, and it is probably what a lot of…
read moreWe are seeing something in the market at the moment that is worth naming plainly, because it is doing real damage to otherwise healthy businesses. It is called loan stacking. A business hits a cashflow squeeze and takes out a short-term loan to bridge it. A few months later the pressure returns, so it takes…
read more...And What to Do About It Profitable businesses close every year, not because the work dried up, but because the cash didn't arrive in time to keep the lights on. Around 50,000 UK SMEs fail annually for exactly this reason, and sixteen close every single day. The frustrating part is that cashflow problems rarely appear…
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