Cashflow

Cashflow is the movement of actual money into and out of your business over time, and it's a different thing from profit. Profit is an accounting view of what you earned; cashflow is whether the money has actually landed in your account. The two diverge constantly: you can invoice 20,000 EUR this month, book it as revenue, and still have an empty bank account because the client pays in 60 days.

For a lean founder, cashflow is survival. More businesses die from running out of cash than from being unprofitable, because salaries, suppliers and the tax office all want paying in real money, not in invoices outstanding. The fix is to see the gap before it bites.

Say you're running your books in Moneybird: the dashboard shows what's owed to you and the age of every unpaid invoice, so you can chase the client who's 45 days late before it becomes a problem rather than after. Then say you build a rolling 13-week forecast in Google Sheets, one column per week listing expected money in and out: a vague "we should be fine" becomes a clear line showing exactly which week you dip below your buffer. Manage it by invoicing the day the work ships, chasing late payers without apology, and keeping a few months of runway in reserve, so a slow-paying client never turns into an existential one.