What the SBA is looking for in your financial statements

What the SBA is looking for in your financial statements

Take a look at your Schedule C from your taxes. It’s entitled “Profit and Loss from Business.” It is very similar to what you would see on a PL form from your bookkeeping software.

The example above shows a profit and loss for the first quarter of 2020, with income and expense totals for January through the end of March.

If the financial statements are not audited, the Applicant must sign and date the first page of the financial statement and initial all other pages, attesting to their accuracy. If the financial statements do not specifically identify the line item(s) that constitute gross receipts, the Applicant must annotate which line item(s) constitute gross receipts.

Treasury Department answer to “What documentation do I need to provide to corroborate that my entity sustained at least a 25 percent reduction in gross income?”

The SBA prefers audited financials. That means you’ve had a CPA or auditing company look through your book keeping and compared it to other things, and it’s made sure everything lines up.

However, you can submit signed copies of your Profit and Loss. When you sign the copy, you’re making a statement that these numbers are accurate.

Sign and date the first page. If your PL is like the example above, it will be one page for 2019, and one page for the same quarter in 2020. Initial the second and following pages, then scan the signed forms and submit.

How to use Bank Statements to Document your Reduction of Revenue

If you didn’t use a book keeping program that lets you create a profit and loss report, you have two options:

  1. Get a program like Hurdlr or Quickbooks Self Employed and enter your information.
  2. Get a copy of your bank records and add it all up.