As the Paycheck Protection Program has again thrown out a life raft of relief loans this past week to struggling small businesses, our friends at INSIDE Public Accounting recently surveyed 110 managing partners and CEOs to find out how their firms worked to serve clients with PPP-related advice and assistance in 2020.
What the survey revealed was 23% of public accounting firms provided general advisory and/or consulting services to clients, the highest-percentage response to a question that allowed for multiple responses. This was followed by assistance with calculations/support material for loan forgiveness (21%), assistance with calculations/support material for loan applications (20%), and loan application documentation review (16%).
While the initial rollout of PPP loans last year was kind of a clusterfuck—for small businesses, their banks, and their accountants—it was a money-maker. According to the IPA survey, respondents reported an average of $547,841 in added revenue from PPP-related services in 2020, ranging from an average of more than $2.2 million for the largest public accounting firms to an average of $120,000 for the smallest.
IPA’s MP/CEO Survey: The Year of PPP [INSIDE Public Accounting]
There clearly are large firms that made PPP loans a business. The average small firm made no where near that. To be honest, I was cutting clients a break to ask forgiveness of $15,000 of PPP loans with a very small fee being charged.