A seasonal business under cash pressure. 4–5 months of working capital runway in one quarter.

The business looked healthy on an annual P&L but spent four to five months a year managing payroll and supplier payments week by week. The founder was carrying the operating stress personally. Four problems were running in parallel and reinforcing each other.

• No view of the cash gap by week. Cash flow was tracked at a monthly grain and only after the fact. There was no forward-looking weekly view of when the off-season gap opened, how deep it went, or when it closed. Every cash decision was reactive — made on the morning of the payment, not in the weeks before.
• Vendor relationships running on goodwill, not terms. Key vendors were being paid on whatever cadence the bank balance allowed in any given week. Some were getting paid late without conversation; others were absorbing the strain quietly. Vendor goodwill was being spent without being managed — and there was no documented case to support a formal extension ask.
• A bank credit line that wasn’t being underwritten. The business had approached banks before but applications had stalled at the credit committee. The fundamental problem was documentation: no rolling forecast, no documented use-of-funds plan, no clear repayment story tied to the seasonal cycle. The underwriting question wasn’t whether the business deserved a facility — it was whether the numbers existed to support one.
• Founder bandwidth absorbed by cash management. For four to five months a year, the founder was effectively the part-time treasurer. Every payment cycle pulled time from growth decisions, customer relationships, and high-season preparation. The opportunity cost was real and compounding — and there was no path out without a proper cash flow forecasting system in place.

This was not a profitability problem — it was a working-capital timing problem, solved with a timing instrument. The core deliverable was a rolling 13-week cash flow forecast, refreshed every Monday, that pinpointed the exact timing and depth of the off-season gap. Around it we built a simple priority-plan framework that turned the forecast into decisions — ranking every payable each week, and giving the business the documented case it needed to negotiate extended vendor terms and to secure a bank working-capital credit line. We built it once and handed it to the internal finance team, with an operating manual, recorded walkthroughs, and a four-week shadow period, so the cadence was theirs to run.