Being Ready for an IPO Does Not Mean Being Ready for a Cash Crisis

A company is preparing for an IPO.

It has a growth story. An investment plan. A clear use for the new capital. A new financing door is about to open.

Then, before that door opens, the company enters court-supervised debt restructuring.

Recently, IPO applications or preparations and restructuring proceedings have appeared side by side in the stories of the same companies. Pakun was one example. A more recent one is İnfinia Advanced Elektronik.

İnfinia’s investor page still lists an IPO target for the third or fourth quarter of 2026, with proceeds intended for production capacity, international marketing, and strategic acquisitions. Yet July disclosures on Türkiye’s Public Disclosure Platform, KAP, announced a three-month provisional restructuring moratorium and uncertainty over payment of certain lease certificates at maturity.

We cannot establish a direct causal relationship between these two facts. It would be wrong to state why a company entered restructuring without examining its balance sheet, cash movements, and financing structure in detail.

But together, they raise a more important question:

Can a company be ready for capital markets but unprepared for a deterioration in cash flow?

Yes.

And one of financial management’s most dangerous gaps begins right there.

Future money is not today’s liquidity

An IPO can provide capital.

A new loan can provide liquidity.

An investor can take a stake.

Assets can be sold.

A large receivable can be collected a few months later.

All are legitimate parts of a financing plan.

But they share one feature:

Until the money reaches the account, it is not cash.

The critical management mistake begins when expected financing is treated as an extension of existing liquidity.

Because a date in Excel and a date in the bank account are not the same thing.

And the company must finance the time between them.

Payroll will not wait.

Suppliers may not wait.

Taxes will not wait.

Debt service follows its own calendar.

Inventory continues to tie up cash.

Exchange rates do not have to follow the budget assumption.

And customers do not know your DSO target.

That is why a good CFO does not relax at the budget cell labeled financing inflow.

They open another cell:

What if it does not arrive?

And another:

What if it arrives late?

Then comes the real question:

How long can we last until then?

Companies often struggle not because of one major event, but because small deviations arrive together

This is the most deceptive aspect of liquidity crises.

Everything does not collapse dramatically one morning.

Collections take a few days longer.

Inventory rises a little.

A supplier shortens terms.

Exchange rates move a few percentage points.

Interest costs increase.

The expected credit line is not fully available.

A planned capital injection is delayed a few months.

Individually, none may trigger a red alert in the boardroom.

But cash does not experience these variables separately.

It experiences them all in the same bank account.

Deteriorating DSO increases working-capital needs.

Rising inventory draws out more cash. As financing needs grow, interest costs rise. If currency exposure moves against the company, a third pressure appears. If expected financing is delayed at that moment, the problem is no longer profitability; it is timing.

The company may still be making sales.

Generating EBITDA.

Holding a full order book.

It may even report a profit at year-end.

But if, on Monday, there is no cash for Friday’s payment, year-end profit will not help much on Friday.

Accrual accounting tells us about performance.

Cash tells us about time.

Sometimes the year-end balance does not tell us what matters most.

Consider two companies.

Both close December 31 with the same cash balance.

The first stays above a liquidity buffer throughout the year.

The second hits its cash low in August. Debt service arrives in September. Collections are delayed in October. A large expected payment comes in November, and it reaches December 31 with the same cash as the first company.

The year-end picture is identical.

The financial story is entirely different.

For a CFO, ending cash is not all that matters; so does the path to it.

In which month did cash hit its low?

What happened to DSCR then?

How many days did collections slip?

How much cash did inventory tie up?

Which items did exchange rates affect?

Where did the loan schedule collide with this picture?

And how many weeks remained for management to intervene?

For someone running a company, the crucial information may be the room to maneuver on September 17, not the number on December 31.

Stress testing is not pessimism

In finance, we give the base case too much deference.

The base case is simply the world in which our assumptions come true.

Companies generally do not struggle in that world.

The real test of a cash model is therefore not whether it calculates the budget correctly, but what it says when the budget proves wrong.

What if expected capital is delayed three months?

Six months?

What if collections slow at the same time?

Inventory days rise?

A currency shock is added?

Financing costs increase?

What if three happen together?

Then the model should do more than produce a new cash balance.

It should give management a map of time:

When does cash reach its minimum?

When is the liquidity buffer strained?

When does debt repayment capacity deteriorate?

Which variable consumes the most cash?

How much additional financing is needed?

And more importantly:

By when must we act to retain options?

Because the day cash runs out is not the day the crisis begins.

I consider this one of financial management’s most critical distinctions.

A crisis does not begin when the bank balance reaches zero.

That is often merely when it becomes visible.

The real break may have occurred earlier.

When it became too late to discuss restructuring with the bank.

When the window for alternative financing closed.

When management waited while supplier terms could still have been negotiated comfortably.

When the operational room to release cash by reducing inventory was lost.

When a collections problem affecting a few customers spread through the entire cash cycle without intervention.

In other words:

A company enters financial crisis when it runs out of options, not merely when it runs out of cash.

The distinction may look small.

But much of a CFO’s work lies between those two dates.

AI’s interesting role in finance is not simply faster reporting.

When AI is discussed in finance today, automation, reporting, data analysis, and forecasting come to mind first.

These are valuable.

But I think the real potential lies elsewhere.

When collection behavior, DSO/DPO/DIO movements, bank balances, debt service, currency exposure, credit structure, and actual-versus-budget variances are continually connected within a living financial structure, the model does more than recalculate the future.

It can reveal earlier which changes management should watch.

There is an important distinction here.

Not every variance is a risk.

A few extra DSO days may be insignificant alone.

But if inventory days are rising, currency exposure is deteriorating, and a large loan installment is approaching, that same DSO movement means something different.

Finance does not need more alarms.

It needs the right alarm.

I believe this is where AI’s real advantage for CFOs will emerge: not making the decision for them, but extending the time available to make it.

Because time is a financial resource in management too.

One that does not appear on the balance sheet.

Why do we start with cash flow at Ainsideme?

Ainsideme’s Cash Flow & Risk Preliminary Screening is the first entry point to this approach.

Using basic data, it provides a quick initial view of cash flow and financial risks.

A company-specific living model provides the broader architecture behind it: cash flow, collection and payment terms, DSO/DPO/DIO, credit structure, DSCR, multiple currencies and exchange-rate effects, base/upside/downside scenarios, stress tests, and forecast-versus-actual variances work together.

Income-statement and balance-sheet projections under IFRS and Türkiye’s Tax Procedure Law, VUK, can also connect to the same structure.

But the aim is not simply to build a bigger model.

It is much simpler:

See the problem while there is still time to solve it.

An IPO is merely a current example.

Tomorrow, it may be refinancing.

A large collection.

A new investor.

An asset sale.

An export receivable.

The name of the financing source changes.

The CFO’s questions do not:

What if it does not arrive?

What if it arrives late?

What if another assumption fails at the same time?

And how many weeks of room to maneuver does the company have until then?

Financial resilience is not believing the future will unfold as planned.

It is knowing what we will do if it does not, before that happens.

Profit matters. Growth matters. An IPO is a valuable financing tool too.

But sometimes the most expensive thing in a company’s life is not capital.

It is being too late.