1. Be honest with yourself about whether any of these signals have shown up in your own business recently.
2. If cash flow genuinely is tight, get ahead of the narrative with key staff rather than letting speculation fill the silence.
3. Build a proper cash flow forecast so you're identifying the problem from the numbers, not discovering it after your team already has.

RBizz builds cash flow visibility so financial pressure gets identified and managed from the numbers — before it becomes something your team notices first. Get in touch if it's been a while since you've had a clear forward view of your cash position.

1. Pull out your current agreement and actually reread it — not the summary you remember, the real document.
2. Check whether the exit and valuation provisions still make sense for the business as it exists today, not as it was when signed.
3. If you don't have a written agreement at all, treat that as the actual emergency it is.

RBizz can connect you with commercial lawyers to review whether your partnership or shareholder agreement still reflects reality. Get in touch before you need it in a dispute, not during one.

A compliance-only relationship is built around processing what you tell them: here's the revenue, here's the expenses, here's the return. There's rarely a moment for pushback in that model, because the job is recording and reporting, not questioning.

A genuine advisory relationship is different. It means an accountant who's actually looking at your structure, your cash flow, your decisions — and is willing to say "this pricing model doesn't cover your real costs" or "this dividend timing is going to hurt you at tax time" or "I don't think this restructure achieves what you think it does."

That kind of pushback isn't the accountant being difficult. It's the accountant actually doing the advisory part of the job, not just the compliance part.

Money tied up in unpaid invoices. You've recognised the revenue and it counts toward profit, but the customer hasn't actually paid yet. A business with slow-paying customers can look highly profitable on paper while genuinely struggling to cover payroll.

Inventory sitting on shelves. Cash spent buying stock doesn't show up as an expense until that stock is sold — meaning a big inventory purchase can drain your bank account without touching your profit figure at all in the same period.

Loan principal repayments. Only the interest portion of a loan repayment is an expense on your P&L. The principal repayment is a real cash outflow every month that never appears as a cost reducing your reported profit.

Tax and GST timing. You've collected GST from customers throughout the quarter, and it sits in your bank account looking like available cash — until the BAS is due and a chunk of that "cash" was never actually yours to spend.

Growth itself. A growing business often needs to spend cash upfront — more stock, more staff, more equipment — well before the resulting revenue and profit show up. Growth is frequently cash-negative even while it's profit-positive.

If you're only reviewing your P&L each quarter and not a rolling cash flow forecast, you're looking at the wrong document to answer "can we actually afford this." Both numbers matter — they just answer different questions.

RBizz builds cash flow forecasting alongside your compliance work, so you're never caught off guard by the gap between profit and what's actually in the bank. Get in touch if you've ever been surprised by your bank balance despite a good year on paper.