ΠΕΡΙΓΡΑΦΗ

Financial distress is rarely caused by one weak month or one missed payment. It usually develops through connected warning signs: deteriorating cash conversion, margin erosion, rising debt pressure, shrinking covenant headroom, customer dependency, supplier strain, weak forecasts, and delayed escalation.

This practical workshop enables participants to identify those signs early, assess their severity, challenge unsupported assumptions, and support timely first-stage stabilisation actions. It focuses on diagnosis, escalation, cash protection, stakeholder communication, and the first 30 days of recovery planning.

ΣΚΟΠΟΣ ΣΕΜΙΝΑΡΙΟΥ

By the end of the programme, participants will be able to:

• Acknowledge how financial distress develops and how liquidity, viability, and fundability can deteriorate together.

• Recognise the principal early-warning indicators across cash flow, working capital, margins, debt, covenants, customers, suppliers, forecasts, and governance.

• Identify the purpose of short-term cash forecasting, covenant monitoring, stakeholder communication, and a first 30-day stabilisation plan.

• Apply a five-lens framework to identify financial, commercial, and governance red flags.

• Analyse cash-flow pressure, working-capital deterioration, margin decline, customer concentration, supplier dependency, and debt-servicing risk.

• Challenge weak, incomplete, or overly optimistic assumptions in budgets, cash-flow forecasts, and covenant projections.

• Prioritise risks by urgency, expected cash impact, reversibility, stakeholder impact, and severity.

• Prepare an initial 30-day stabilisation plan with clear actions, owners, deadlines, controls, and escalation points.

• Communicate material concerns objectively and constructively to management, directors, lenders, or other relevant stakeholders.

• Develop a professional scepticism when reviewing management explanations, liquidity reporting, forecasts, and recovery assumptions.

• Develop a proactive and responsible approach to escalating material concerns before financial pressure becomes a crisis.

ΣΕ ΠΟΙΟΥΣ ΑΠΕΥΘΥΝΕΤΑΙ

This course is designed for professionals with responsibility for financial oversight, liquidity, forecasting, risk, governance, commercial performance, or business resilience, including:

• CFOs, finance directors, finance managers, and financial controllers.

• Accountants, management accountants, FP&A professionals, and treasury professionals.

• External auditors, internal auditors, assurance professionals, and business advisers.

• Risk, governance, compliance, and business-resilience professionals.

• Credit-control and working-capital professionals.

• Business owners, directors, and senior managers with financial accountability.

• Consultants supporting SMEs, owner-managed businesses, and mid-sized organisations.

The course is relevant across trading, manufacturing, construction, hospitality, professional services, technology, financial services, and project-based businesses.

Recommended prior knowledge: Participants should be comfortable reading basic management accounts, cash-flow forecasts, and key business-performance information. No restructuring or insolvency experience is required.

ΠΕΡΙΣΣΟΤΕΡΕΣ ΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΕΣ

Training Outline

Recognising Distress Before Crisis

• Temporary underperformance versus liquidity stress, structural distress, and crisis.

• Introduction to liquidity, viability, and fundability.

• Facilitated diagnostic poll: identify warning signs commonly ignored in practice.

Cash, Liquidity and Working-Capital Triage

• Operating cash flow versus profit

• Cash burn

• Liquidity runway

• Rolling short-term cash forecasts

• Debtor ageing; creditor pressure

• Inventory build-up

• Overdraft utilisation

• Payroll, tax, debt, and essential supplier commitments.

• Cash-flow triage exercise: identify immediate cash risks, forecast weaknesses, and priority information needs.

Margin, Customers, Suppliers and Commercial Viability

• Gross and contribution margin

• Cost inflation

• Discounting

• Loss-making customers or contracts

• Break-even pressure

• Customer concentration

• Cancellations

• Disputed invoices

• Supplier dependency

• Tightening credit terms.

• Commercial-risk review: distinguish symptoms from root causes and identify reversible versus structural issues.

Funding, Covenants, Forecast Credibility and Governance

• Debt-service pressure

• Refinancing risk

• Covenant headroom

• Downside sensitivity

• Lender-reporting obligations

• Forecast variance

• Optimism bias

• Delayed reporting

• Board visibility

• Management accountability.

• Forecast and covenant challenge: identify assumptions requiring evidence, correction, or escalation.

Integrated Financial-Distress Case Study

• Participants receive a fictional business case showing weak margins, rising debtor days, supplier pressure, overdraft use, covenant risk, customer dependency, and unrealistic forecasting.

• Group output: five-lens red/amber/green risk map and prioritised diagnosis.

First 30-Day Stabilisation Plan

• Cash protection

• Collections

• Expenditure control

• Supplier engagement

• Contract and customer-profitability review

• Funding engagement

• Management reporting

• Governance rhythm

• Ownership and milestones.

• Planning workshop: prepare a stabilisation plan with actions, owners, deadlines, expected cash impact, dependencies, and escalation points.

Escalation, Stakeholders and the Audit/Governance Lens

• Escalating concerns to management and boards

• Communicating with lenders, suppliers, customers, employees, and shareholders

• Forecast evidence

• Management bias

• Going-concern indicators

• Documentation and authority limits.

• Stakeholder communication exercise: prepare a concise, evidence-based escalation recommendation.

Case Debrief and Implementation Commitment

• Review the distress cycle, priority actions, and common judgement errors.

• Individual action commitment for the participant’s organisation, finance function, audit portfolio, or client base.

Training Style

The programme is designed to equip participants with practical knowledge and strengthen their professional capabilities through a highly interactive and application-focused learning approach. Delivery combines short, targeted lectures with case studies, practical examples, facilitated discussions, and realistic workplace simulations.

Through structured discussion, peer exchange, and facilitator feedback, participants will apply the concepts, tools, and techniques introduced throughout the programme while strengthening their analytical thinking, problem-solving, professional judgement, and decision-making skills. By the end of the programme, they will be better equipped to respond confidently and effectively to comparable workplace challenges.

CPD Recognition

This programme may be approved for up to 3 CPD units in Accounting and Auditing. Eligibility criteria and CPD Units are verified directly by your association, regulator or other bodies which you hold membership.