Restructuring Cases 2026: The Thirteen Week Cash View

The firms that do this work publish no restructuring case

Start with something the market's guides do not mention, because it changes how you prepare.

AlixPartners publishes its hiring process in detail. Five named steps: "1. Recruiter interview", "2. Hiring team interview", "3. Assessment", "4. Case interview and/or technical and skills assessments", "5. Final team interviews", checked 30 September 2026 at alixpartners.com. The case step is conditional, and the page says so: "Depending on the role, the next step in the process is a case interview and/or a technical or skills assessment."

What the AlixPartners site does not contain is a single practice case, prompt, exhibit or figure. The firm whose business is restructuring names a case step and publishes nothing to work through. FTI publishes more of the shape and still no case, naming an assessment day with an individual case study, an interview and a group assessment on its Australian graduate page.

Its entry programme page tells you what the work involves instead. The training covers "cash management, insolvency and due diligence, as well as modules in basic programming (Python, SQL and PowerBI)", published at alixpartners.com. Cash management is named first. And the case study step is described as being there "to give you a true sense of what it is like to work on an AlixPartners engagement".

So the practice material for this case type has to be built rather than found, and the arithmetic below is ours for that reason.

A restructuring case worked weekly, and the wall averages hide

Here is the prompt. Every figure is ours, posed as an assumption, and you should label your own out loud.

Mersey Components has $520 million of annual revenue, EBITDA of negative $8 million, $14 million of cash and a fully drawn revolver. The lender wants a plan in a fortnight.

1. Average weekly receipts. $9.6 million, reflecting a collection lag behind sales.
2. Suppliers. $6.9 million a week.
3. Payroll. $2.4 million a week.
4. Rent and utilities. $0.5 million a week.
5. Interest. $0.3 million a week running.
6. Other disbursements. $0.4 million a week.

Disbursements total $6.9 plus $2.4 plus $0.5 plus $0.3 plus $0.4, which is $10.5 million a week. Net weekly burn is $10.5 million minus $9.6 million, so $0.9 million.

Runway on $14 million of cash is $14 million divided by $0.9 million, which is 15.56 weeks, so roughly 16 weeks. That is the number a candidate usually reports, and it is wrong in the way that matters.

There is a lump. A $6 million interest and amortization payment falls due in week 10, on top of the $0.3 million running line. Cumulative burn by week 10 is 10 times $0.9 million, so $9 million, leaving $14 million minus $9 million, which is $5 million of cash. The $6 million payment takes that to negative $1 million.

So the company runs out in week 10, not week 16. The average overstated the horizon by six weeks, and it did so because a weekly average smooths exactly the events that kill a company.

Why the forecast has to be weekly and lumpy

Say precisely what the previous section showed, because the wrong summary is easy and common.

The wrong version: the company has about four months. That follows from the average and it is false.

The right version: the company has ten weeks, and the binding constraint is a single dated payment rather than the operating burn. Two consequences follow, and both change the recommendation.

First, the plan has to produce $1 million of cash before week 10, which is a small number. Every lever gets ranked by whether it lands in time rather than by how much it is worth. Second, the operating burn is the smaller problem in the short run and the whole problem after week 10, which means the plan needs two horizons and has to say so.

This is why practitioners build a thirteen week cash view line by line rather than a monthly forecast. Payroll runs fortnightly. Rent and insurance are quarterly. Tax is quarterly. Debt service falls on fixed dates. A monthly model averages all four into a smooth line and hides the week the account goes negative, which is the only week anyone is actually asking about.

Build yours the same way. Rows for each receipt and disbursement, columns for thirteen weeks, and the closing cash balance on the bottom row where the lender will look first.

Ranking the levers by when the cash lands

Now the levers, each with its own arithmetic and its own timing.

Work the first row. Supplier spend is $6.9 million a week, so 15 extra days of float is 15 divided by 7, which is 2.143 weeks of spend, times $6.9 million, so $14.79 million. Call it roughly $14.8 million.

Read that figure correctly, because it is the one candidates over-claim. It is more than the entire $14 million cash balance, and it is a one-time release of working capital. It buys time and it does not change the burn rate by a single dollar. After the float is taken, the company still loses $0.9 million a week and the terms cannot be stretched twice.

Now the second row, which is the one most structures put first. Assume two of six regions produce $84 million of revenue and negative $6 million of EBITDA. Closing them removes the $6 million loss and leaves $2.4 million a year of stranded overhead, so the annual run rate improves by $6 million minus $2.4 million, which is $3.6 million. Weekly, that is $3,600,000 divided by 52, so $69,231, which takes the burn from $900,000 to $830,769.

And it costs $9 million in severance and lease exits, now. On cash alone, $9,000,000 divided by $69,231 is 130 weeks, which is two and a half years.

The sequence arithmetic forces in a restructuring case

Put those two rows side by side and the recommendation writes itself.

The closure is the right structural answer and the wrong first move. It consumes $9 million of cash a company with $14 million and a week 10 wall does not have, and it repays that cash over 130 weeks against a 10 week horizon. Doing it first is how a solvent restructuring becomes an insolvent one.

The supplier stretch is the right first move and a bad answer on its own. It releases $14.8 million, which clears week 10 with room, and it improves nothing. A plan that stops there has bought a quarter and spent the company's last piece of balance sheet flexibility on it.

So the sequence is float first, closure second, funded out of the float. State it in that order and give the two numbers that force the order: $14.8 million available inside six weeks, and $9 million required for a saving that takes 130 weeks to return. The ordering is the answer, and it comes from the timing rather than from the size.

One more discipline belongs here. Every one-time lever has to be labeled as one-time in the recommendation, because a lender reading a plan that mixes $14.8 million of working capital release with $3.6 million of annual run rate improvement cannot tell what recurs. Separate the two lines explicitly.

What the filing data actually says

Restructuring cases assume a going concern. It is worth knowing what the base rates look like, and the United States publishes them.

Table F-2 of the bankruptcy filing statistics covers the 12 months ending 30 June 2026. Total filings across all chapters were 608,511. Filings where business debt predominated numbered 26,941, split into 15,298 under Chapter 7, 9,766 under Chapter 11, 1,337 under Chapter 13 and 540 under other chapters, published at uscourts.gov.

Recomputing from the table: 15,298 plus 9,766 plus 1,337 plus 540 is 26,941, so the business column reconciles. Chapter 11 across both columns is 9,766 plus 554, which is 10,320, matching the published total.

Two ratios follow. Chapter 7 was 15,298 over 26,941, which is 56.8 percent of business filings. Chapter 11 was 9,766 over 26,941, which is 36.2 percent.

Now state what that shows, and only that. Among US filings where business debt predominated in that 12 month period, liquidation under Chapter 7 was the most common chapter, ahead of reorganization under Chapter 11. It does not say that most distressed companies liquidate, because the vast majority of distress never reaches a court at all: business filings were 26,941 of 608,511 total filings, which is 4.4 percent. The out of court restructurings that make up most of the consulting market appear in no public statistic by construction.

Ask the horizon before recommending in a restructuring case

Every threshold in a restructuring is a date, and different creditors hold different dates. So ask.

Published cases show how much the horizon changes an answer even outside distress. Oliver Wyman declines a business earning 17.5 crore a year because entry "does not align with the client's investment criteria for a five-year payback period", checked 30 September 2026 at oliverwyman.com. A profitable business, refused on time.

A restructuring gets neither five years nor one. It gets the next covenant test, the next payroll, and the next debt service date, and those are the bars every lever is measured against. Three questions open the case.

1. What is the nearest dated obligation, and how large? That sets the horizon for everything else.
2. Who can extend it, and what do they want? A covenant waiver, a term stretch and new money are three different negotiations with three different prices.
3. What is the liquidation value against the going concern value? If liquidation is worth more, the restructuring question is who gets the difference rather than how to fix the business.

The third question is the one candidates avoid and the one a creditor asks first. Answering it does not require a recommendation to liquidate. It requires saying what the plan has to beat.

Where the points go on a turnaround case

The scheme that follows is ours. Its dimensions and weights come from the grading code in src/lib/grading, and because no consulting firm publishes a rubric for a case interview, nothing here is any firm's official scheme.

Experience, and what stays unpublished

One first-hand account exists and it is thin, so here is exactly what it is. AlixPartners publishes a careers blog post by Laura Bracht, a consultant in its Munich office, who writes in the first person about her own application. She says: "As a restructuring consultant, I was very familiar with AlixPartners before I applied to work here as it is the industry standard." On the process itself: "My favorite part of the recruiting process was the discussions I had with interviewers on previous projects I worked on and case studies." The page carries no date, its footer reads 2024, and she describes herself as early in her career, so we date her hiring no more precisely than at or before 2024. It is one account, published by the employer, undated, and from an experienced hire, and it establishes nothing about format, length or content. We also searched Reddit, which refuses connections from this network, university career pages and trade press, and found nothing else citable.

Five things stay unpublished. No turnaround firm publishes a practice case, which is why every figure on this page is ours. The court data gives filing counts and no case durations, no exit rates and no liabilities. Out of court restructurings, which are most of the market, appear in no public statistic. Mersey's receipts, disbursements and closure costs are assumptions we posed. And no firm publishes a threshold at which it recommends liquidation over reorganization.