5 places a small business leaks money, and how to check each one

Most small businesses don't lose money in one big mistake. It leaks out in five quiet places: missed calls, quotes nobody followed up, invoices nobody chased, renewals that lapse and subscriptions nobody uses. Each one takes about ten minutes to check, and none of them needs new software. Here's what each leak looks like and how to check yours this week.

Why these leaks are easy to miss

None of these jobs is hard. They slip because they're nobody's job in particular.

A survey of 1,000 UK small and medium-sized business owners put admin and finance at about 11 hours a week. That's nearly twice the time they spend on sales and business development. When the week is that full, the small follow-ups are the first thing to fall off the list. Nobody decides to ignore them. They just never quite get a turn.

So the fix usually isn't working harder. It's knowing where to look, and looking at the same time each week.

1. Missed calls

Picture a Tuesday morning. You're on a job, the phone rings, and you let it go to voicemail. When you check later, there's no message. Just a number.

Think about the last time you called a business and got voicemail. Did you leave a message, or call the next number? Plenty of your customers do the same. A missed call often doesn't wait. It goes to whoever picks up.

The check: open your call log and count last week's missed calls. How many got a call back the same day?

What we do: one person owns the missed calls. They check the log twice a day, call back the same day and write down who called and what they needed. You can't answer every call from a ladder, but every missed call can be checked.

2. Quotes nobody followed up

You sent the quote last Tuesday. They said they'd look at it over the weekend. Now it's Thursday, you haven't heard back, and by next week it feels awkward to call.

Sometimes the job isn't lost on price. It just goes quiet. A busy owner and a busy customer both forget, and whoever calls back first often gets the work.

The check: list every quote you sent in the last 30 days. Mark the ones that had a follow-up. Look at the ones that didn't.

What we do: every quote gets a follow-up date the moment it goes out. Day 3 and day 10, then let it go. The follow-up doesn't need to be clever. One quick question, like whether the start date still works, is enough. It reads as service, not as a sales push.

3. Invoices nobody chases

An invoice lands in a busy inbox marked "due on receipt." There's no date to put in the calendar, so it waits behind everything that has one. Thirty days late can quietly turn into never.

When we rewrote our own payment reminders, three things changed the draft:

• A real date. FreshBooks looked at more than a million small business invoices. Specific terms, like 7 days, got paid faster than longer or vaguer ones.

• A thank you. The same data showed invoices with a simple "please" or "thank you" were more likely to get paid.

• An earlier first reminder. Ours now goes out three days before the due date, not after. Plenty of late payers aren't refusing. They just forgot. A note before the due date reads as help. The same words a week later read as chasing.

The check: open your invoicing tool and filter for anything unpaid after 30 days. Then look at drafts. An invoice that never left the drafts folder is the easiest money you'll find this week.

4. Renewals that lapse

Insurance, licences, permits, the business registration, the domain name for your website. Each renews once a year, so nobody remembers the date, and the notice often goes to whoever set it up years ago.

Catching a renewal early is cheap. Catching it late can mean a lapse in cover, a late fee or a website that stops loading.

The check: write down everything that renews yearly, with three things next to it: the date, the cost and the email address the notice goes to.

What we do: one calendar holds every renewal, with a reminder 30 days ahead. Notices go to a shared business inbox, not to one person's personal email.

5. Subscriptions nobody uses

A tool you tried for one project. A second seat for someone who left. An annual plan that renewed while you weren't looking. One by one they're small, and that's why they last.

The check: go through the last two months of your company card statement and highlight every recurring charge. For each one, ask: did anyone open this last month?

What we do: anything nobody used gets cancelled or moved to a cheaper plan. Everything that stays goes on the same list as your renewals, with an owner and a renewal date. That way the next one doesn't surprise you.

What the five have in common

Each leak is small on its own. Together they add up, and they all have the same cause: nobody is looking at them every week.

The simplest way we've found to keep them shut is a short check before the week closes. Fifteen minutes on Friday. List every open quote, invoice and promise. Put a date next to each one. Look at next week's calendar. Pick the three things Monday starts with. Monday is easier when Friday did the sorting.

Check your own business

These five are where we'd start, but they aren't the only places money slips out. Our free Money Leak Checklist has 12 quick questions, including the five above, and takes about ten minutes. No sign-up: allyxon.com/checklist