CPA Advises Small Business Owners on Financial Strategy, PPP, ERTC, and More

January 14, 2022

The most recent NFIB Small Business Reset and Recovery webinar focused on small businesses creating financial strategy for 2022

CPA Advises Small Business Owners on Financial Strategy, PPP, ERTC, and More

In a recent NFIB webinar, NFIB’s COVID-19 experts, Beth Milito and Holly Wade, were joined by special guest DJ Antonacio, CPA, CAMS. He provided advice and tips on how to create a successful financial strategy for 2022: managing finances, accounting strategies, and updates on federal tax programs, including the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC, also known as the ERC). “There’s going to be two themes I want to focus on throughout this portion of the presentation,” Antonacio started. “A lot of it is going to be documentation related: no matter what practice it is that you’re doing when running your business, you’re only as good as the documentation that you retain. So record keeping, documentation, that is the number one theme.” “The second theme is priority and also timeliness. Whether it’s the PPP program or whether it’s budgeting, factoring sales numbers, projected revenue, projected inventory into your annual planning, that’s also documenting.” The reason why Antonacio believes budgeting is so essential for any small business is because it serves as a planning tool for the future. “There really can’t be enough planning in advance,” he said. “I’m going to use the example of a business that had some form of supply chain disruption throughout 2020 or 2021. If you’re in the business where you’re needing to order inventory for sales on a regular basis… are you getting inventory at the same frequency and costs that you used to be? More often than not, the answer to that is no.” The information from budgeting is helpful to adapting to the impacts of supply chain disruptions to small businesses, Antonacio adds. He then moved on to discussing the PPP loans, which were issued in two separate rounds. While most first-round PPP loans have already been forgiven, quite a few second-round loans have not. “If your second-round PPP loan is outstanding, contact your banker, contact your financial consultant, contact your CPA to show you the steps and make sure that you’re doing that process the right way,” Antonacio warns. “If you have applied for forgiveness, you do need to look back at if you were able to claim ERC and how that documentation jives with one another.” DJ emphasized the importance of making sure that if a small business participated in any federal programs, their documentation should agree. “We advise putting together a calculation spreadsheet that not only details how the credit is calculated, but how the PPP loan factors into things,” he said. “Essentially, if you received the PPP loan round one and you also claim the ERC for 2020, there’s certain actions and demonstrations that should most likely be done to show that you’re not double dipping in that standpoint… it’s very important that your forgiveness documentation and your PPP loan is the same information that you used to represent your ERC.” Along with several other subjects, Antonacio finished the webinar by answering questions from small business owners.

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