A cash crisis rarely announces itself cleanly. More often it arrives as a creeping unease — a payroll that feels tighter than usual, a supplier chasing harder than before, a bank balance that does not seem to recover between payments. And then, suddenly, it is not a feeling any more. It is a fact.
What you do in the first 100 hours matters enormously. Not because every problem can be solved in four days — most cannot — but because the actions taken in the earliest stage of a crisis determine how much room you have to manoeuvre in the weeks that follow.
In a cash crisis, the most dangerous thing is not the crisis itself. It is the delay between recognising it and acting on it.
Hours 0–24: Stop, Assess, and Establish the Facts
Know your actual cash position
The first task is deceptively simple: find out exactly how much cash you have. Not what your accounting system says. Not an estimate. The live bank balance, across every account the business holds, reconciled and confirmed. In a multi-entity or multi-site business, this means consolidating those balances into a single number.
This is your starting point. Everything that follows is built on it.
Map the next 30 days of cash movements
Before you speak to anyone — lender, supplier, or advisor — you need a basic picture of what is coming in and going out over the next four weeks. This does not need to be a polished model. It needs to be honest. What invoices are due for collection and when? What payments cannot be deferred — payroll, HMRC, critical suppliers? Where are the gaps?
This exercise will tell you one of three things: the problem is manageable with some careful sequencing; the problem requires external support; or the problem is acute and requires immediate professional advice. All three are better than not knowing.
Resist the urge to act before you understand
The instinct in a crisis is to do something — to make calls, move money, defer payments, reassure people. Resist it, at least until you have the facts. Decisions made without a clear picture of the cash position often make things worse: creditors who might have waited are alerted unnecessarily, lender relationships are tested before you have anything coherent to say, and options are closed off before they have been properly considered.
Hours 24–48: Prioritise and Protect
Triage your obligations
Not all creditors are equal in a cash crisis, and managing cash under pressure requires clear-eyed prioritisation. A useful framework:
- Critical — payroll & business critical suppliers. These cannot be deferred without severe operational consequences.
- Important — HMRC, secured lenders, utilities, insurances. These are priorities with deferment likely to create legal, regulatory or operational stress.
- Important — key suppliers whose goodwill or continued supply is essential to trading. These require proactive communication and, where possible, agreed payment plans.
- Manageable — creditors where payment can be deferred without immediate consequence, provided communication is handled professionally.
Knowing which category each obligation falls into allows you to make rational decisions about cash sequencing rather than simply paying whoever shouts loudest.
Protect your banking relationship
If your cash position is likely to breach an overdraft limit, a covenant, or a facility condition, your lender needs to hear about it from you — before they see it on a statement. A proactive call or meeting, however uncomfortable, almost always produces a better outcome than a reactive one. Lenders are not unreasonable when they are informed. They become very difficult when they feel they have been managed, blindsided or misled.
You do not need to have all the answers when you make that call. You need to have the facts, an honest assessment of the position, and a clear commitment to follow up with a plan.
Identify any quick cash levers
While you are building your forward picture, look for any immediate opportunities to accelerate cash. Are there invoices that could be chased today? Customers who might pay early in exchange for a small discount? Supplier payments that could legitimately be held for a week without damaging the relationship? Stock or assets that are surplus to requirements?
These are not solutions — they are breathing space. But in the early hours of a crisis, breathing space is exactly what you need.
Hours 48–100: Build Visibility and Get the Right People in the Room
Start building the 13-week model
By this point you should have enough information to begin constructing a proper 13-week cash flow forecast. This is the tool that will underpin every significant conversation you have over the coming weeks — with your lender, your board, your advisors, and potentially your major creditors.
It does not need to be perfect at this stage. It needs to be structured, honest, and based on real data from your debtor and creditor ledgers. The act of building it will surface information you did not have — overdue invoices you had forgotten, payments you had not anticipated, timing mismatches that explain why the position deteriorated.
Open structured conversations with key creditors
For the creditors in your ‘important’ category — significant suppliers, HMRC, any landlord whose goodwill matters — early, proactive communication is almost always the right call. Most creditors, when approached professionally and honestly, will agree a short-term payment plan rather than escalate. What they will not tolerate is silence, broken promises, or being the last to know.
In our work with a multi-site care homes group under severe cash pressure, one of the first priorities was opening structured conversations with major suppliers and HMRC to agree realistic payment plans. Those conversations, handled professionally and backed by a credible cash flow model, materially reduced the immediate pressure on the business and created the space needed to stabilise.
Bring in the right advisors
If the crisis is material — if you are genuinely uncertain whether the business can meet its obligations, or if your lender relationship is under real strain — this is the point at which to bring in experienced external support. Not because you cannot manage the situation yourself, but because an experienced advisor brings three things that are very difficult to provide for yourself in a crisis: objectivity, credibility with lenders and other stakeholders, and a framework for action built on having navigated similar situations before.
The businesses that recover from cash crises most effectively aren’t always the ones with the best underlying position. They are the ones that get the right people involved earliest.
What Not to Do
As important as the actions above is what to avoid in the first 100 hours:
- Do not ignore it. Hoping the position improves on its own is the single most common mistake. It rarely does, and delay almost always reduces your options.
- Do not make promises you cannot keep. Telling a creditor you will pay on a date you cannot be certain of destroys trust and goodwill that is very hard to rebuild.
- Do not move money between entities without advice. In a group structure, intercompany transfers during a period of distress carry legal risk that can have serious personal consequences for directors.
- Do not avoid your lender. As noted above, proactive disclosure is almost always better than reactive disclosure. Your lender has seen this before. They can help — but only if they know.
- Do not try to manage everything at once. A cash crisis creates pressure to solve every problem simultaneously. Focus first on the actions that buy you time and preserve your options. Everything else follows.
The Underlying Truth
A cash crisis is frightening. The pressure on management teams — and on the individuals behind them — can be immense. But the great majority of cash crises that end badly do so not because the underlying business was unviable, but because the response was too slow, too disorganised, or too isolated.
The first 100 hours are about creating clarity, buying time, and building the foundation for a credible plan. None of that requires having all the answers. It requires facing the facts, communicating honestly, and moving with purpose.
A business in a cash crisis that acts quickly, communicates clearly, and plans rigorously has far more options than one that does not — regardless of where the numbers start.
If your business is facing acute cash pressure and you need support — whether that is building a 13-week forecast, managing lender communications, or simply having an experienced advisor in the room — SIMBA Advisory works with SMEs at exactly these moments.