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You land the job. Actually land it — the good one, the R42,000 shopfitting contract you’ve been chasing since April. You invoice it that afternoon, feeling like a genius. Your accounting software agrees with you. Best month you’ve logged all year, sitting right there in the profit line.

Then Friday comes. Wages are due. The timber supplier wants his account settled. And the number in your actual bank account hasn’t moved an inch, because that R42,000 has 60-day terms attached to it and the client hasn’t so much as opened the invoice email yet.

This isn’t a bad month. It’s a normal one that looks bad because you’re reading the wrong number.

Your accounting software isn’t lying to you, exactly

Profit gets counted the moment you raise the invoice. That’s how accrual accounting works, and it’s the right way to measure whether your business actually makes sense as a business. But it counts money you don’t have yet as money you’ve made, and nobody warns you how strange that feels the first few times it happens.

Cash doesn’t care about your invoice date. Cash cares about what cleared. And in South Africa right now those two numbers are drifting further apart than they used to — private-sector payment cycles are commonly running 90 to 150 days once you factor in delivery, invoicing and terms, according to National Treasury figures reported by the Mossel Bay Advertiser. That’s not a Garden Route problem specifically. It’s just the gap you’re sitting in right now, with a number attached.

The list you’ve probably never sorted by date

Most of us check our outstanding invoices by amount. The big one at the top gets the attention; the small ones get ignored because R1,200 doesn’t feel worth a follow-up email. Wrong way round. Sort by age instead. The invoice that’s been sitting there 45 days is doing more damage than the one that’s three days old and ten times the size, because it’s telling you something about that client’s habits, not just their balance.

We ran the same maths a few weeks back on what a tight runway actually looks like — this is the other half of that conversation. Runway is what’s left. This is what’s owed.

Before you close the laptop tonight:

• Open your invoicing tool and sort outstanding invoices by age, not amount.
• Find the oldest one. Not the biggest — the oldest.
• Send one message. Not a threat, just a nudge: “Following up on invoice #___, due date has passed, let me know when I can expect payment.”

That’s it. Two minutes, one email, and you’ll sleep slightly better than you did last night — because a chased invoice gets paid faster than an ignored one, nearly every time.

Reply and tell me: what’s the oldest unpaid invoice on your books right now, and how many days has it been sitting there?