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:
- Get a program like Hurdlr or Quickbooks Self Employed and enter your information.
- Get a copy of your bank records and add it all up.
- Download or print out your bank records for every month of 2019 and 2020. Do this for EVERY bank or debit card that you have had earnings deposited in.
- Underline or highlight every deposit that was a payment for your business. Do not leave anything out. Skipping over payments can get you in trouble.
- Add up all of those payments for every month.
- Add those totals up for every quarter.
Gather together every bank statement for every bank for every month in the quarter that you’re claiming a reduction of revenue for. Highlight or underline every deposit. Then scan those into one document that you can upload.
Some thoughts about using bank statements.
In the gig economy it’s easy to have payments sent to more than one place. You might get payments deposited to your bank account, but then use Doordash’s debit card for instant pay. Or maybe you changed banks. Don’t leave anything out.
It’s hard to do if you changed banks. With a lot of banks, you can’t log in to get your bank statements once you’ve closed the account. If that happens you’ll need to contact your bank.
Don’t be tempted to leave out any statements because they don’t have deposits on them. You want to be thorough. Even if you have several pages of bank records that have nothing underlined, include them.
In the example above, I blurred out some transactions https://tennesseepaydayloans.org/cities/erin/. Don’t do that on your bank records that you turn in. Don’t block anything out.
The important thing is, you don’t want to give them any reason to think you’re leaving anything out or trying to hide anything. If anything looks shady or seems to be missing, they can come back asking for more information.