The balance that's lying to you.

We had a brilliant October. Three group bookings landed in the same fortnight, deposits came in fast, and the account looked better than it had all year. I remember thinking we'd finally earned a bit of slack.

So we bought some kit we'd been putting off, gave the team a decent bonus before Christmas, and went into January feeling reasonably solid. Then the supplier invoices started arriving.

The money was gone. Not stolen, not wasted — just spent. Spent on things that felt affordable in November because the number on the screen looked large. What I hadn't done was subtract everything that was already claimed against that balance before I'd touched a penny of it.

A deposit comes in and it feels like income. Sometimes, in an accounting sense, it is. In cashflow terms, it mostly isn't — not yet. That two thousand pounds someone paid in October for a May tour is sitting there, but the accommodation supplier wants paying in March, the coach needs its deposit in January, the guide wants their terms met before the season starts. By the time the customer turns up in May, you've laid out most of the cost already.

What catches you is not knowing, at any given moment, how much of your balance is genuinely free and how much is already assigned. Most people run on gut feel for this. They know roughly what's coming in and roughly what's going out. But roughly is a very different thing from knowing.

A group booking feels like a windfall because it lands as one payment. Sixteen people going to the same race weekend, one organiser writes the cheque. That's a healthy lump sitting in your account this morning.

What you've also done, by accepting it, is commit to supplier costs that don't flex much even if the group shrinks. And it usually does shrink. Three people drop out in February, the organiser emails about refunds, and suddenly your income is down a couple of thousand while your costs haven't moved. None of that was visible when the money landed. The balance looked fine right up until it didn't.

The worst version of this is seasonal. You take deposits through the summer for the following spring. The account looks comfortable in September. But you've got staff to pay through winter, a quiet January and February where almost nothing comes in, and costs that don't stop. So you spend the spring deposits covering the winter gap. Then spring arrives and you're scrambling to meet the costs those deposits were supposed to cover.

I've seen businesses run this way for years. Not dishonestly — just because really watching where every pound was committed felt like more work than there was time for. It catches up eventually. Usually at the worst possible moment, like the week before a big departure.

The fix isn't complicated, but it does need building. You need a view — separate from your bank balance — that maps your confirmed future costs against the deposits you're holding for each event. Not a massive system. Clear enough that when you look at the account in November you can see: this much is free, this much is already spoken for, this is the real number.

Once you can see it, the decisions get a lot easier. You stop spending money that isn't really yours yet. You spot the tight windows before they become crises. And the next time you have a good October, you celebrate the right amount. If building that visibility into your booking system rather than bolting it on separately sounds useful, I'm happy to have that conversation.