Even for businesses like mine, postal strikes are a pain. And they seem totally self-defeating.

Fortunately, I'm not in the distribution business. But the Royal Mail strikes are still a right royal pain in the neck, even for me. The golden rule for every business at the moment, as everyone keeps telling me, is to watch your cashflow. Whether you're worrying about dwindling income or increasing costs, you need to make sure that you have enough cash in the bank to pay the bills and pay your staff. And that's not easy when a sizeable chunk of this income is languishing in a sorting office somewhere in North London, while lots of postal workers stand outside shouting at management (assuming strikers still do that these days?).

In some respects, I'm surprised by how many of our clients still pay us by cheque, rather than via electronic transfer. In this day and age, it seems amazing that people still transfer money by scribbling on a bit of paper that could end up anywhere, rather than opt for the greater security of electronic banking (well, apart from when some brain-dead bank employee accidentally leaves your account details for all the world to see on the 7.32 from Paddington).

But in other ways, it makes perfect sense. I've always tried to be a good payer, but in the early days we used to pay people by cheque because it bought us a few extra days of having the money in the bank. Now that a cheque can take an age to arrive, and then another few days to clear, you can effectively extend your payment terms by two or three weeks. Nobody's going to admit to doing this, but I bet it's happening (we’ve definitely thought about it a couple of times).

I don't know anything about what's going on at Royal Mail, so I have no idea whose fault all this is. But it’s patently obvious to anyone with a brain that the service is never going to recapture its glory days. Just about the only thing I use it for these days is getting internet shopping delivered, and I noticed that Amazon was quick to make alternative arrangements when the latest strikes were called. So I’m not quite sure what the unions are hoping to achieve, exactly – there’s surely no way the service can support anything like the same number of staff it had a couple of years ago.

Anyway, like I said, what do I know. All I really care about is getting my hands on the money people owe me, so I hope to goodness that someone manages to sort something out before I start getting calls from my bank manager. And in the meantime I plan to do my own little bit to hasten the Royal Mail's demise: I'm going to start trying to get all new clients to agree to pay by electronic transfer rather than cheque, as a condition of trading with us. Presumably I won't be the only person doing this, either. Yet another reason why these strikes seem a bit self-defeating.