Accountants now have a new tool, CPALoanPortal.com, for providing Payment Protection Program advisory services to their clients. The platform is designed to help businesses assess their PPP loan forgiveness eligibility, and comes in response to the current coronavirus crisis that has forced many businesses to seek lending solutions to get through this period.
CPALoanPortal.com is the result of a joint effort between the American Institute of CPAs, CPA.com (the AICPA’s tech arm) and Biz2Credit, which makes solutions for small business lending. The portal is an evolution of Biz2Credit’s PPPforgivenessTool.com platform, with new, CPA-centric capabilities added. It incorporates the PPP forgiveness calculator developed by the AICPA and is available to any business approved for a PPP loan. The platform produces all government forms required under the PPP program, supports calculations for payroll and other expenses, and produces a master report with the applicant’s electronic signature that can be delivered to the underwriting lender.
Special features include:
- Functionality for firms to aggregate clients, customize engagements and track progress on loan and financing applications;
- Integration with additional lending options for clients; and,
- Enhanced customer service for CPA firms.
Two subscription tiers, premium and enterprise, are available based on the number of users and volume of loan applications managed by a firm. The original basic loan forgiveness application service remains free.
“Firms are looking to have a process and tool to manage a large volume of different client forgiveness applications,” said Erik Asgeirsson, president and CEO of CPA.com. “Their clients went to many different lenders. With CPALoanPortal.com, they have a centralized approach with a dashboard to manage all clients, a visual on where they are in the loan forgiveness process, a process for receiving source docs. You can do a preview on whether a client owes money or doesn’t, and go back to see whether all the relevant data was included in the application. There is a need for managing this process — you can’t do it with pen and paper or with Excel, it’s too complex.”
CEO of Biz2Credit’s Rohit Arora sees a future of accelerated digital adoption, driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s important to get cutting-edge digital capabilities now,” he said. “No one is coming and meeting with you face to face for a very long time. Every loan above $2 million will get audited, and there are already over a million $150,000-and-above loans in play. Firms will not be able to get their arms around these numbers unless they go digital. It’s crucial that CPAs play a key role in guiding small businesses through these decisions, particularly when it comes to financing.”
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