Three months of winter trading are now in the books. Compare your June quarter to your March quarter honestly, seasonality you can measure is seasonality you can budget for, and most businesses never actually run that comparison.
June, July and August are notoriously difficult for South African SMEs: consumer spending dips, operational costs creep upward, and most owners simply brace for it as an unavoidable force of nature. Treated as a dataset instead, the winter trading period tells you exactly how your business behaves under pressure, information you can use rather than just endure.
August brings the first period of provisional tax (IRP6) for most companies on a February year-end. If winter genuinely depleted your cash reserves, finding the liquidity to settle that payment gets harder right when it's due. PAYE stays largely static regardless of a seasonal revenue dip, and VAT payments still need to be met on time to avoid penalties. If your seasonal drop forced a scramble for tax payments this year, your annual planning needs adjusting so cash is ring-fenced during peak months specifically to cover the trough.
A comparative report only works if your chart of accounts separates seasonal cost drivers clearly. Did utility bills spike from winter tariffs and increased heating load? Did flu-season absenteeism drive overtime or temporary staffing costs? If these are all lumped into a single "utilities" or "staff costs" line, you can't actually see what winter did to your numbers.
Extract your March quarter management accounts and your June quarter figures side by side. Flag any revenue line down more than 10% and any expense line up more than 10%. If revenue dropped R250,000 over winter, the real question isn't the drop itself, it's whether your variable costs fell proportionally. Fixed costs, rent, salaries, insurance, software, don't move with revenue, so when revenue falls and fixed costs hold steady, your margin compresses sharply. Check whether your winter revenue consistently dips below your break-even point. If it does, summer profits are quietly subsidising winter operations, and that's worth knowing before it happens again next year.
Run the March versus June comparison now. Extract both quarters and flag any line that moved more than 10%.
Isolate the winter-specific cost drivers. Split utilities, staffing and marketing spend into trackable categories rather than one lump line.
Calculate your winter cash deficit. Multiply the shortfall by 1.5 as a safety factor, that's your target cash buffer for next winter.
Tighten collections through the trough. Slow winter sales make late-paying clients even more damaging, review debtor and creditor days now.
A reasonable starting point is 1.5 times whatever cash your business absorbed during its worst winter month this year.
Not necessarily, but if fixed costs stayed level while revenue fell, your margin has compressed even if you haven't noticed it yet in daily cash terms.
Yes. Even modest seasonal variation, once measured, gives you a genuine basis for budgeting rather than guessing.
Winter cost your business something specific and measurable, not just a vague sense of a slower few months. Run the comparison, isolate the drivers, and budget for it properly next year. For more on financial planning, see our blog.
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