However, as long as those guidelines are in place, business owners who take PPP money are still advised to follow the rules.
Mah also suggests negotiating with contractors to whom your business owes money that isn't available at the moment. Unfortunately, businesses can not include payments to contractors in their payroll costs, Mah notes.Jessica Mah, founder and CEO of inDinero."I'm telling everyone: 'Negotiate with all your contractors and tell them to get their own PPP … and then negotiate a better price with them,'" Mah says.
For what it's worth, SCORE's coronavirus resource hub notes that many vendors and contractors should be open to negotiation — whether that means lower payments, or spreading payment over a longer period of time — simply because they won't want to lose a long-term source of income. Ideally, Mah suggests that business owners ask their banks to create a sub bank account — a separate account within an existing, larger bank account — that can be called, simply, "PPP bank account" and the loan money can be placed there for easier tracking of how it's disbursed. That will help you create "a paper trail," according to Mah.
Some business owners could have to trim their payroll to a point that they know will allow their business to survive in the long run, especially with uncertainty around how long coronavirus restrictions will remain in place and how the economy will look once they're lifted. That may mean asking for less PPP money, since 75% needs to be used for payroll.
No one really knows when coronavirus restrictions will be fully lifted and the U.S. economy will return to some sense of normalcy. That's part of what makes it extremely difficult for small business owners to formulate plans to keep their businesses afloat until they can eventually reopen their doors.