Getting Paid: A Cash-Flow Field Guide for Australian Tradies

This week we shipped Tradie Mate — a quoting and invoicing app for Australian sole traders and small crews. Building it meant spending a lot of time on a problem that has almost nothing to do with the trade itself: the gap between finishing a job and having the money in the account.

That gap is where small trade businesses die. Not from a shortage of work — from a shortage of cash while the work is being done. This post is about the mechanics of that gap: where the money leaks out, what the paperwork actually has to say to be valid, and why the fix is a system rather than a resolution to try harder.

It is written for the person doing the work and the admin. If you have a bookkeeper, most of this is already handled and you can stop reading.

Three Leaks

Ask a sole trader where the money goes missing and you usually get "clients are slow". That is a symptom. Underneath it there are three separate leaks, and they need three different fixes.

The quote that went quiet. You priced the job, sent it, and heard nothing. Two weeks later you have no idea whether it is dead or just sitting in someone's inbox under forty other emails. The job goes to whoever called back.

The invoice that drifted. Fourteen-day terms turned into forty days. You have a feeling someone is late, but not who, or by how much, because the answer lives across your head, your sent folder, and a spreadsheet you stopped updating in March.

The retention nobody tracked. A slice of every progress payment on the job was held back. It was written into the contract, then forgotten by everyone except the party holding it.

Each leak has the same shape: an obligation with a date attached, and nothing watching the date.

Leak One: The Quote

A quote is a sales document with a shelf life, not an archive entry. It has a decay curve — the further you get from the site visit, the more the client's memory of you fades and the more the other two quotes look equivalent.

Three things make the difference, and none of them are about pricing better.

Follow up on a schedule, not on a feeling. A quote that has not been answered in three or four business days deserves a nudge. Not an apology, not a discount — a short message that assumes the deal is still alive and asks a specific question. "Did you want me to hold the week of the 8th?" outperforms "just checking in" because it asks for a decision rather than a status update.

Make the quote legible. Line items with quantities and a short description of what is included, plus what is explicitly excluded. Most disputes about variations later are actually disputes about what the original scope said. Site photos attached to the quote cost you nothing and settle a surprising number of arguments.

Record the outcome. Won, lost, or went quiet. Do this for six months and you have a win rate, which is the only number that tells you whether your pricing is wrong or your follow-up is. Most people never know which one is hurting them, because they never wrote down the losses.

Leak Two: The Invoice

Get the document right first

An invoice that a client's bookkeeper cannot process is an invoice that sits in a pile. Worse, if you are registered for GST, a document that is not a valid tax invoice stops your client claiming their GST credit — which is exactly the kind of thing that gets an invoice bounced back to you three weeks later.

The ATO's requirements for a tax invoice on a taxable sale of less than $1,000 are that the document contain enough information to clearly determine:

• that the document is intended to be a tax invoice
• the seller's identity
• the seller's ABN
• the date the invoice was issued
• a brief description of the items sold, including the quantity (if applicable) and the price
• the GST amount payable, if any — shown separately, or as a statement such as "Total price includes GST" where the GST is exactly one eleventh of the total
• the extent to which each sale on the invoice is a taxable sale

For sales of $1,000 or more, the invoice also has to show the buyer's identity or ABN.

Two things follow from that list. First, "invoice" and "tax invoice" are not interchangeable words — if you are registered for GST, the document needs to present itself as a tax invoice. Second, your ABN is not decoration. If you do not quote an ABN and the payment is more than $75 excluding GST, the payer is generally required to withhold tax at the top rate — currently 47% — and send it to the ATO rather than to you. You will get it back eventually through your return. "Eventually" is not a cash-flow strategy.

If you are not registered for GST — under the $75,000 turnover threshold, and you have not registered voluntarily — you issue a plain invoice with no GST on it, and you should not be charging GST. Putting GST on an invoice you are not registered to collect is a genuine problem, not a rounding error.

Then watch the clock

Payment terms are a promise, and promises need a supervisor. The practical version of this is an ageing view: every unpaid invoice sorted by how many days past due it is, visible the moment you open the books. Not a report you generate — a number you see.

What you do with that number is an escalation ladder, and the discipline is that the tone firms up on a schedule rather than at the point where you finally lose your temper:

• A few days over. Assume it is an oversight, because usually it is. Resend the invoice with a one-line note. Do not apologise for asking.
• Two weeks over. Reference the terms explicitly and ask for a payment date, not a payment. A date is easier to give and easier to hold someone to.
• A month over. Put it in writing that this is now a formal reminder, restate the amount and the original due date, and say what happens next.
• Beyond that. Letter of demand, and for construction work, the statutory route below.

The ladder matters more than any individual message, because the client learns the pattern. A tradie who follows up on a schedule gets paid before the one who does not, from the same client, out of the same pool of money.

The small stuff that removes friction

Print the bank details, BSB, PayID and any payment link directly on the invoice. Number invoices in an unbroken sequence and void rather than delete a mistake, so the sequence stays intact — a missing number is a question you will be asked at some point, and "I deleted it" is a bad answer. Ask for a deposit on anything with materials in it, so you are not financing the client's job out of your own account.

Leak Three: Retention and Progress Claims

On commercial and construction work, you often do not invoice once at the end. You invoice in stages, and a percentage of each payment is held back.

Progress claims split the job into stages — 50/50, 30/40/30, or whatever the contract says — and you claim as each stage completes. This is not an administrative nicety. It is the difference between carrying a month of materials and labour on your own credit and being funded as you go.

Retention is money the principal holds back against defects, commonly around 5% during construction, often reduced at practical completion and released after the defects liability period ends — frequently twelve months later. The exact percentages and periods are whatever your contract says, and some states now require retention money to be held in trust accounts above certain thresholds.

Retention disappears for a boringly mechanical reason: the release date is twelve months out, it was never written anywhere with a reminder attached, and by the time it comes due the job is long finished and the paperwork is in a box. Nobody on the other side is going to volunteer it.

The fix takes thirty seconds and has to happen at the moment you raise the invoice, not later: record the amount held, record the contract terms, calculate the release date, and put a reminder on it. That is the whole system.

The statutory backstop

Every Australian state and territory has security of payment legislation covering construction work. The broad shape is consistent even though the detail is not: you serve a payment claim, the respondent has a defined window — commonly ten business days, but it varies by jurisdiction and by contract — to serve a payment schedule saying what they propose to pay and why. If they do not respond in time, they generally become liable for the claimed amount. If they schedule less than you claimed, or schedule and then do not pay, you can apply for adjudication, a fast determination by an independent adjudicator rather than a court case.

This is a genuinely powerful mechanism and it is under-used by small subcontractors, mostly because the timeframes are short and unforgiving. Miss a deadline and the remedy evaporates.

Two caveats, and they are real ones. The acts differ meaningfully between states — the Queensland, NSW, Victorian, South Australian, ACT and WA regimes are not interchangeable, and several have been amended in recent years. And this is a summary written by software engineers, not lawyers. Read your own state's act, or talk to someone who has. Nothing here is legal advice.

The Real Problem Is Not Discipline

Everything above is common sense. Most tradies know it. They still lose the money, and the reason is worth stating plainly: this is a systems problem wearing a discipline costume.

The work happens on site. The admin happens at night, tired, after a full day, on a phone. Any process that depends on remembering to check something will fail during exactly the busy month when the amounts are largest. That is not a character flaw. It is what happens when you put a scheduling problem inside a human head.

The design principles that actually survive contact with a work week:

One place, not four. If clients live in your phone, jobs in your head, quotes in your email, and invoices in a spreadsheet, then no view of "what am I owed" exists anywhere. Reconciling four systems is work, and work that is not billable does not get done.

The system watches the dates, you make the decisions. A reminder that fires when a quote goes quiet or an invoice ages past its terms replaces the memory you were relying on. What the reminder must not do is send anything on its own.

Draft the message, do not send it. We are firm about this one. Automated dunning emails damage client relationships in a trade where most of your next job comes from the last client or their neighbour. The right split is: the software writes the draft and hands it to you; you read it, adjust the tone for that specific client, and press send. A relationship you have with someone for a decade is not something to hand to a scheduler.

Assume no reception. Basements, sheds, and paddocks are where quoting actually happens. If the tool needs a connection to produce a quote or a PDF, it will fail at the moment you need it. This is the same argument we made about local-first architecture in finance apps, and it applies harder on a work site than it does on a couch.

Export everything. At BAS time, and at tax time, your accountant wants a CSV and a folder of PDFs — not a login to a system they have never seen. Data you cannot get out is data someone else controls.

What We Built

Tradie Mate is our attempt at exactly the system described above, for iPhone. Clients, quotes with on-screen signature, ATO-shaped GST tax invoices carrying your ABN and bank details, deposits and progress claims, retention with a calculated release date, on-site time tracking, and follow-up reminders that pre-write the chase message and then wait for you to press send.

It runs on the phone and syncs through your own iCloud account. There is no WILLNEEDS account, no server of ours, and no way for your job data to reach us. It is free to start — unlimited clients, plus twenty open quotes and twenty unpaid invoices at a time — and Tradie Mate Pro is AU$9.99 a month or AU$99.99 a year, with the first month free.

It keeps records and drafts documents you review yourself. It is not accounting, tax, or legal advice, and it does not replace reading your own contract.

Building something for a trade, a field service business, or an industry where the paperwork is the bottleneck? Get in touch — it is the kind of problem we like.