Cash rate at 4.6 per cent: a cash flow check for sole traders

The Reserve Bank of Australia has raised the cash rate target by 25 basis points, a quarter of a percentage point, to 4.60 per cent. The decision and the Board’s reasoning are set out in its monetary policy statement, which points to inflation outcomes that were stronger than expected at the previous meeting, higher global energy prices as conflict in the Middle East broadened, and domestic capacity pressures. It is the fourth increase this year and takes the rate to its highest in about 15 years. If you work for yourself, the rate on its own is not the story. What tends to follow it is: clients sitting on invoices a little longer, any variable borrowing costing more, and a quarter where the gap between work invoiced and money banked matters more than usual.

General information, not tax advice. The ATO is the authority - see ato.gov.au or ask a registered tax or BAS agent.

The squeeze reaches you through other people

There is rarely a direct line from a cash rate decision to a sole trader’s week. It arrives second hand. Variable rate business loans, overdrafts and equipment finance reprice. Customers with mortgages pull their spending in. Business customers who are watching their own bank balance quietly stretch payment terms from 14 days to 30, and from 30 to whenever.

The Board’s statement notes that firms are facing cost pressures and are either raising prices or looking to, and that business debt growth has stayed strong while housing lending has declined noticeably. Two practical things come out of that. If any of your borrowing is on a variable rate, it may be worth asking your lender what the repayment becomes and when. And if you have been holding a price set earlier in the year, the people you buy from have probably not been holding theirs.

Find out what is actually owed to you

Before changing anything, get the real number. Pull up every invoice that has not been paid in full and sort it into three piles: not yet due, overdue by a week or two, and overdue by a month or more. Start with the oldest, not the largest. An invoice that has sat for six weeks is the one most likely to turn into a write off.

For each overdue one, check three things before chasing: whether it actually reached the right person, whether the contact details and purchase order reference are right, and whether the client has ever acknowledged receiving it. A surprising share of late payments are admin failures rather than refusals, and those are the fastest to fix.

Where a client has gone quiet in a tight quarter, it often means a cash problem of their own. A payment plan you propose is worth more than one you find out about later.

The card surcharge ban lands in the same week

Separately, from 1 October 2026 businesses can no longer apply surcharges to card payments, a change explained on business.gov.au. It covers eftpos, Mastercard, Visa and American Express, and the Reserve Bank is lowering the fee caps that sit behind those payments at the same time. Weekend and public holiday surcharges, booking fees and service fees are not part of the ban.

The job this week is to find every place a card surcharge is written down or switched on: your website, a booking page, a printed price list, the terms you put at the bottom of invoices, and the settings in the payment terminal or online checkout itself. Most systems will not turn it off on their own. Whether the cost gets absorbed or folded into prices is a separate decision, and one worth making with the actual fee figure from your provider in front of you rather than a guess.

Keep the money that is not yours out of the squeeze

When cash is tight, the account balance starts to look like working capital even when part of it is not. If you are registered, the GST you collect on a job is money you are holding for a later activity statement, and the same goes for any PAYG instalments and staff super. Moving those portions into a separate account on the day a payment lands is a small habit that removes a large problem in three months time.

If you are already behind on a tax debt, the ATO would rather hear from you early than late, and a payment arrangement asked for is treated differently to one chased. That call could be worth making before the quarter closes rather than after.

Shorten the gap on the next job

Terms are easier to set than to enforce, so set them before the work starts. Agree payment terms in writing, take a deposit on anything with materials in it, and break longer jobs into progress claims rather than one invoice at the end. Then invoice the day the work finishes instead of saving it up for the end of the month, because that habit alone can add two or three weeks to every payment you are waiting on.

Apsis is built for the chasing half of that. The invoice list filters by status and searches by number, title, overview, notes or client, and flags rows that are overdue, so a quarterly clean up does not start with a spreadsheet. Part paid invoices carry their own status, which matters when a client pays in two goes. The business overview has a cash flow card showing expected receipts from sent and part paid invoices due in the next 30 days, which is the number to look at before committing to anything. Payment terms are stored once and printed on every quote and invoice, so if a surcharge line is sitting in yours, that is one place to update rather than many. On the paid plan, invoice reminders go out without you having to remember them.