Fluence spent three hours last night on a phone conference with 79 CPAs that are part of the Academy of Dental CPAs. In our opinion this group is the best of the best. The purpose of the phone conference was to share knowledge surrounding the Paycheck Protection Plan (7a) (PPP) loan, which is set to go live tomorrow. We know you are reading articles and watching webinars from various sources, and because there is a lot of information being thrown at you (some right, some wrong), our goal is to be clear on what has been verified and what can’t be verified since we are still waiting for guidance.
SBA PPP 7(a)
What we know right now:
- Bankers do not have an application form. They cannot process PPP Loan apps yet.
- We don’t have all of the answers for exactly what will be on the application and what information may be needed to make the loan calculation
- The National Association of Government Guaranteed Lenders (NAGGL) is holding a banker’s meeting Friday the 3rd at 10:00 am Pacific Time. Keep in mind that this meeting was supposed to happen on Wednesday, April 1st, and it was pushed back to Friday. It is possible that this meeting could get pushed back again.
- We have all been told that Friday, April 3rd is the day you can start applying. This could be delayed again, but we are still operating under the assumptions the loan process will begin Friday the 3rd.
Once we have all of the answers and PPP applications can be processed, we anticipate a rush of applications.
Right now, there are two schools of thought:
- Apply as soon as possible because the money is first come first serve and the funds could run out. Please keep in mind this is purely speculative, and it is likely that more money would become available, if needed. We just want to make you aware of what could happen.
- Do not apply now because it is possible that you could receive the funds but not be able to open your practice. Then you would not be able to spend the money in the eight-week window and therefore not all of it would be forgiven.
We tend to agree with the first option, get your application in now, and figure out a way to spend the money. We are hoping banks will have the ability to delay funding of the PPP until you are able to open your practice again, but that question has not been answered by the SBA. Even if your practice cannot open and you receive the PPP loan money, you can use a portion of it in the eight-week period, for qualified items and you will, at least, get partial forgiveness of this money as well as have the option to pay back any unused funds or have a nice, low-interest, rate working capital loan to use when you reopen.
We anticipate our clients needing help with gathering the data to give to the banks for the application. We are going to do our best for the people who need our help. It looks like you are going to need to run payroll reports and obtain information on the employer contributions for retirement and health insurance for a specific time period, which has not been released yet. You may also be required to do a calculation to arrive at the number the SBA wants. Once we have instructions, we will interpret for you through an email/blog, and if you feel like you and your team can do this on your own, then that will be the fastest way to submit the application.
If you want Fluence to help you with this, we need you to let us know as soon as possible so that we can get you on our list and we can, hopefully, access enough of our team to do it as fast as we can. Please keep in mind that we will, most likely, have capacity issues, especially with this coming at the start of a weekend. We cannot guarantee how fast we can run your payroll reports. We will make every effort to get it processed as quickly as possible.