Doing Our Part in a Pandemic: Why We Built PPP Calculator

TLDR: We've released a project we’ve been working on called Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Calculator. You can use it to estimate how much of your PPP loan will be forgivable by the federal government come June 30th. You can find it at https://ppploancalc.com.

When Congress passed the CARES Act in April, we knew from the size of the dollar amounts involved that there would be huge demand for these loans. Turns out, we were right about that. The loan program ran out of money in a week and a half and Congress has recently added more funding.

In talking to our financial advisors, it seemed that most folks were aware that some of the loans are forgivable, but not aware of how they could calculate the forgiveness amount. Reading the full text of a law is not exactly the most thrilling pastime.

We think that, in general, laws are complicated and hard to understand. So, we wanted to do our part. We aren’t financial advisors or lawyers, but we know how to translate requirements into working software. This sort of problem lends itself very well to custom software. While you could use a spreadsheet for this, it's easy to make difficult-to-catch mistakes with spreadsheets, which then leads to bad decision-making off incorrect data. An application like this, backed by thorough testing, helps to manage complexity and mitigate errors.

Doing our part in this is helping out the millions of owners and employees of small businesses across America who are worried about how to make payroll. These loans through the SBA are really important right now. They will keep millions of folks employed at otherwise functional and profitable businesses instead of forcing owners to furlough or lay off their staff. Keeping folks employed will help speed economic recovery by avoiding having to hire and train.

According to the legislation, up to 100% of a PPP loan may be forgivable at the end of the loan period. We built a calculator to help you figure out how much of your loan may be forgivable. Plug a few numbers in and you can quickly estimate your final loan balance, after forgiveness.

We also respect the privacy of these small businesses that received these loans. We don’t want your proprietary operating information. So we built the calculator to work entirely in your browser - none of the information you enter gets sent to anyone. This means information that should stay confidential remains confidential.

You can find the calculator at https://ppploancalc.com.

At Unabridged, we work hard to reduce complexity for our clients. We try to anticipate challenges and mitigate errors. We hope that we did that here for you and we are ready to help you further as we all recover from this crisis.

Stay safe!

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