By Meg Montgomery, Accounting Manager and Alison Goebel, Executive Director

Like millions of other small businesses in the United States, GOPC has applied to the Payroll Protection Program (PPP).

We know that many small businesses still haven’t applied.  Below we share our experience as one reference point. 

We also came away from the process in agreement with many of the ideas outlined in this piece; if there are additional rounds, we hope federal lawmakers will take these observations seriously.

• Contact your bank, immediately.  We are assigned to a specific banker at our bank and he did a great job shepherding us through the process.  Banks are swamped right now handling applications and much of the initial program allocation has been claimed.  Now is the time to get to know your banker. 

• Consult your bank for information. As the program details were being finalized, accountants, lawyers, philanthropy and others tried frantically to provide information to their clients or constituents on the types of documents they needed for their loan application.  We found that many of those emails and web-pages were well-intended, but didn’t adequately prepare us for the application process with our bank. The best source of what your bank will need is your bank.  

• Be ready to pull a lot of financial and organization information. The information our bank needed wasn’t particularly complicated, there was just a lot of it. Our banker required information about our annual revenues, incorporation details, detailed records of employee W-2s, benefits, and taxes, Quickbook reports, etc. Our particular bank will require more information from us to finalize the loan paperwork. Because of the volume of applications, bank staff has to move quickly. For your intake call, make sure you are in a location where your files are at your fingertips.

• Loan amount determined immediately but timing less definite.  At the end of the intake process, we had a hard number we are seeking a loan for but we didn’t know how soon we’d receive our loan.  We did not get a confirmation email from our bank or SBA at the time of the application.  One week later we received an email from our Bank saying we have been assigned an SBA procurement tracking number but the timeline wasn’t specified. In talking with partners that have received their loan or are bankers, we think we’ll receive the loan within 10-14 days of receiving the procurement number, but that has not been confirmed either way by our bank.

GOPC is not in a position to advise on the specific application process, but we hope sharing our experience provides some help.  Best of luck in your own PPP applications!