Australian small to medium businesses are stuggling, with more than three quarters having faced a cash flow crisis in the past 12 months.

Tariffs and a cost-of-living crisis have forced many owners to take out business loans or dip into their own personal savings just to stay afloat.

And if nothing changes, it could put thousands out of business – and hurt everyday Aussies’ hip pockets.

Daniel Trkulja, 27, started his business ThreadLAB as a print shop in 2015 and spent the last decade bulding it into a premium apparel printing business.

He should be riding the high of a job well done, but the last few years have been tough.

“A lot of trouble with tariffs and the trade war have come up, business has been tight, confidence in the market is down,” he told 9news.com.au.

“And you’re hearing more excuses when it comes to payment.”

According to new data from Airwallex, late payments are costing Australian small to medium businesses $24,000 annually on average.

Trkulja confessed the uptick in clients paying late or asking for extensions has put financial pressure on him and the business.

“The biggest killer for cash flow is just getting paid on time,” he said.

And that’s provided he gets paid at all.

“In the last three months, we’ve had one client go bankrupt with over a million dollars of stock on the way to them, and another client do us for $200,000 because they decided to go bankrupt without telling anyone,” Trkulja revealed.

That kind of loss could quickly run a small to medium business into the ground.

Especially when so many are also struggling with higher overhead costs due to wage growth, rent and utilities in recent years.

An Airwallex survey of 500 Australian small to medium business owners and decision-makers found that more than half had to dip into personal savings to cover operational costs in the last 12 months.

Some industries have faced more hardship than others, especially those that are contract based like building and construction.

“It comes part and parcel for a small to medium business owner to dip in from time to time, but if it’s increasing over time and is becoming more and more prevalent, that’s concerning,” Airwallex Head of Sales, SME and Growth Matt Patterson told 9news.com.au.

“If nothing changes, it’s definitely going to be a period of sustained pressure.”

More than a third of those surveyed took out business loans to manage shortfalls.

But for some small to medium businesses it’s still not enough, and they’re forced to shut up shop.

The number of businesses entering insolvency risen sharply over the past couple of years according to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), many of them due to challenging economic conditions.

“The flow on effects of that will be dramatic to individual Australians through less competition, increased prices, whatever it might be,” Patterson said.

“So we need to make sure that we’re protecting them [small to medium businesses] and providing as much support as we can to them.”

Trkulja feels fortunate that his business is established enough to weather these financial challenges, especially with the support of financial technology companies.

But confessed that, had he faced this hardship earlier in his journey, it might have put ThreadLAB out of business.