Original publication date: July, 2008
In January, Softshare revamped the SBA Economic Impact worksheet, giving it a new name and new line items to help you more easily generate the milestone/goal numbers important to SBA. Called the Economic Impact/Capital Infusion worksheet, this new worksheet mimics, whenever possible, the calculations performed by the EDMIS system.
Recently, it came to Softshare’s attention that there were some discrepancies in our calculations. In WebCATS build 423, we’ve remedied those discrepancies and added few new calculations for your convenience:
As it turns out, many more businesses qualify as business start-ups than Softshare originally realized. Softshare had two criteria in place for this goal that weren’t necessary:
Previously, as Softshare understood it, clients were counted as new businesses created if their business start-up date was sandwiched between two counseling sessions. However, after discussions with Bruce Purdy, we learned that an investment session occurring after the business start date also qualifies the client as a new business created.
It had also been our understanding that in order for a business start-up to count in the current reporting period, the company’s established date also had to fall within that reporting period. This is not the case. Only the session (counseling or investment) that occurs after the business established date determines when the client is counted as a new business created.
Previously, this Chrisman reporting definition used a fixed start date of October 1, preventing centers that base their operations on a calendar year from running it using their own criteria. Now, the start date for long term clients counseled is based on the globally-configured Fiscal Year Start Month setting (located on the Reporting tab of WinCATS’ global configuration settings).
When it came to training event information, the Economic Impact/Capital Infusion worksheet provided the total number of training events and their attendees, but not sessions. It was recently brought to Softshare’s attention that the total number of sessions was also important to SBA (‘CATS has been uploading the number of sessions to EDMIS for years now, but not providing it on the worksheet for your review). So we’ve added a new line item to also provide you with the total number of training sessions (as entered into the Number of Sessions field) that occurred during the reporting period.
Any client that received its very first counseling session during the reporting period will show up under this new heading.
If you’d like to take a closer look at the calculations performed by the Economic Impact/Capital Infusion worksheet, visit its in-depth help file, called Understanding the Economic Impact/Capital Infusion Report.