- If your net profit for 2019 was negative, meaning that you took a loss in your business last year, PPP will not be a great option for you. If your business took a loss prior to COVID-19, you will not have been considered to have a salary, and it will pawn shops in Alabama be more difficult for you to represent that COVID-19 has had a negative impact on your business.
- The Economic Injury Disaster Loan (“EIDL”) was a viable alternative to the PPP. This was a grant available up to $10,000. COVID 19 EIDL advances were also available, as were many other commercial grant programs. In fact, the Finimpact Squad dedicated an entire article to the huge list of resources that were available during COVID and were surprised that so few business owners knew of their available options.
- As an S-Corp, shareholder distributions do not count towards your salary. Your only way to remit payroll taxes is through payroll itself; you don’t pay any payroll taxes or self-employment taxes on your distributions.
Believe it or not, there are many reasons why you may not wish to take out a PPP loan (when it was available). First off (as mentioned above), is that most businesses will not actually qualify for forgiveness! This was something of a slight of hand perpetuated by the SBA. Still, a loan at 1% is extremely competitive, though not quite the free offering as was advertised.
The second consideration is that you are likely to lose many employees anyway, for a myriad of different reasons. The entire purpose of PPP is to pay employees so they can come back to work when the virus has ended. But many simply do not wish to go back to work, as they are afraid of catching the virus or because they can simply make more through Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which is another method of relief. Continue reading “PPP Caveats – Was It Really Worth It?”