Journal

Cash-flow cadence for family firms

11 March 2026 · 11 minutes

Family firms in regional Australia often treat cash as weather: commented on, rarely forecast. The quarterly pack arrives from the accountant looking complete and already stale. Nobody reads it in the ute between jobs, which is where most of the firm’s judgement actually lives.

A cadence that survives that life is short. We ask for a thirteen-week view that names receipts you believe, receipts you hope for, and wages you cannot delay. The hope column is allowed. Pretending hope is a receipt is not.

The Friday huddle is twenty-five minutes. Three numbers only: cash at bank that morning, invoices you will actually send this week, and the largest payment that could slip. If a fourth number appears, it waits. This is the same discipline we use in the cash-map module of The SME Board Compact, minus the twelve-week scaffolding.

Arguments will happen. Someone will want to keep a slow-paying cousin on the books because “that is how Dad did it.” Name the gift. Put a dollar on it. Then decide whether the gift still belongs in a year when overtime is already high. The huddle does not exist to humiliate relatives. It exists so the humiliation, if it comes, is scheduled rather than accidental.

Tools can be a spreadsheet. They can be a whiteboard in the tea room. They should not be a dashboard nobody logs into. If your bookkeeper already produces a 40-line cash report, cut it until a supervisor can recite the three numbers without looking.

None of this replaces BAS timing or a facility conversation with a bank. It does replace the superstition that “we always get through Christmas.” Some firms do. The ones that do not usually had the information and lacked a room in which to use it.