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Ask most small business owners whether their business is seasonal and they’ll say no. Seasonal is for ice cream vans, Christmas tree growers and plant nurseries, not for marketing agencies or IT consultants or heating engineers.

Except heating engineers are flat out from October through to February and often see work drop off sharply in summer. Landscapers are the opposite, busy through spring and summer and noticeably quieter over winter. Your business has cash flow pressure points, whatever your industry. The same points, every single year.

The question is whether you see them coming in time to do anything about them.

Where your cash flow pressure points usually come from

For many non-retail or hospitality businesses, December is a low activity month. Decisions get pushed back, work slows down, and key people start disappearing on leave. January can squeeze your cash flow from both directions. Fewer invoices went out in December because work was quieter. The ones that did go out take longer to be processed, because your clients are heads down in planning and budgets.

If you’re an accountant, you’ll know this feeling well. January means self-assessment submissions, and when you’re buried in those, chasing your own overdue invoices tends to slip at exactly the point when it needs the most attention.

Summer brings its own version of the same problem. The longer school holidays mean longer leave, and the person who approves your invoices or runs the payment process is quite possibly sitting on a beach somewhere. Your invoice isn’t going anywhere until they’re back.

None of this is news. You’ve almost certainly been here before. So why does it still catch you out year after year?

The squeeze comes from both sides

It’s not only that your clients are slower to pay at these times. It’s that you’re often just as stretched as they are.

In January you’re planning, setting goals, dealing with the post-Christmas pile. In August you might be taking leave yourself, or managing a team that is. Chasing overdue invoices gets pushed down the list at exactly the moment when consistent credit control matters most.

The debt doesn’t shrink while you’re distracted. It just gets older, and older debt is harder to recover.

The preparation happens before the pressure point, not during it

The time to act on your cash flow pressure points is always before they hit, not during them. If August is your crunch, June and July are when to focus. Get your aged debt as clean as possible before the slowdown hits, have conversations with clients about upcoming invoices before people disappear on leave, and know exactly what’s outstanding and what needs chasing.

For the Christmas and January pressure point specifically, we’ve written about this in more detail in our blog on avoiding crippled Christmas cash flow.

Your cash buffer matters here too, and not just in terms of chasing. No matter how well you manage your credit control, some payments will inevitably be late during these periods. Going into a known pressure point with a healthy cash reserve is a shrewd move. Which also means being careful about big spending decisions in the run up to those periods. A new piece of equipment or a significant investment looks very different when you know a lean few weeks are coming.

The principle is simple: pull in as much of what you’re owed as possible before the tap slows down, and protect what you’ve got while it does.

The alternative

For many business owners the honest answer is that credit control needs to happen consistently regardless of what time of year it is, what leave people are taking, or how deep into delivery you are.

That’s one of the practical advantages of outsourcing. Your credit controller doesn’t have the same cash flow pressure points in their working year. They’re chasing your invoices in August while you’re on a beach, and on top of your aged debt in January while you’re writing your business plan. The pressure points in your calendar don’t become pressure points in theirs.

If you’d like to talk about how that might work for your business, get in touch.