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Understanding the Economic Impact/Capital Infusion Scorecard (ver. 2023)

The SBA requires all SBDCs and WBCs to submit economic impact data via Nexus. SBA initiated some new changes in 2018 and again in 2023, and this scorecard incorporates these modifications. It should be noted, that some line items canot be run prior to 2018 (such a jobs created/retained and change in sales), and some line items cannot be run prior to 2023 (such as new business start impact). Furthermore, because these are client metrics, and client records are associated with a single center, this scorecard is not well suited for those programs that offer cross-center counseling but who want to run goal sets on a single center.

This FAQ is divided into two main sections:

In order for a counseling session, milestone or capital funding event to be considered by the Economic Impact/Capital Infusion Report, the session records must:

  • Have the Reportable? check box selected
  • Have a date in the Reporting Date field for capital funding records or have a date in the Date field for milestone records that falls within the reporting period
  • Be assigned to the counselor specified in the scorecard definition (only applicable if the scorecard's output is restricted to a single counselor)
  • Be categorized under the funding funding sources specified in the scorecard definition
  • Be categorized under the sub-funding funding sources specified in the scorecard definition. Keep in mind, that if you are trying to reconcile the scorecard with your Nexus reports, then you should be aware of the fact that Neoserra will only export sub-funding sources to Nexus that are officially recognized by Nexus.
  • Be assigned to the center (or one of the centers) specified in the scorecard definition

Economic Impact Data

The first 6 headings of the Economic Impact/Capital Infusion Report track new businesses created, jobs created and retained, and changes in sales/profits. This section, in particular, is dependent upon the new tracking tables incorporated into Neoserra effective October 1, 2018. For this reason, these line items will not yield accurate results for any periods prior to October 1, 2018. The following sections discuss how Neoserra calculates each economic impact line item on this report in accordance with SBA's requirements.

Note:Keep in mind that Nexus only recognizes jobs for clients who are in-business with a business estabished date. For this reason, the scorecard will also ignore jobs added for pre-venture clients.

Line Item 2 & 3: New Business Start Impact

Line item 2 counts all clients with a Reportable New Business Start Impact Date within the scorecard reporting period that have received either counseling assistance and/or who have reported capital infusion. To learn more about this field on the client record, please refer to this FAQ.

Line item 3 includes these same client who have a Reportable New Business Start Impact Date within the scorecard reporting period that have received either counseling assistance and/or who have reported capital infusion, but this line item also includes clients who have only received training. In other words, this line item includes clients with whom you have had no one-on-one contact but who nonetheless have a Reportable Business Start Impact Date within the current reporting period. This line item most closely correlates to the Nexus CRMA dashboard, however, this line item may not adhere to the SBA definition for this metric, which states:

    Counselor determines that the Resource Partner provided assistance with the business start.

Note: You will get inaccurate data if you try to run this line item on a per-center or per-counselor basis because one client may have been counseled by multiple counselors at multiple centers, and Neoserra will simply look for the date on the client record, not taking into account which counselor entered the date.

If you want to track Business Start Impact on a per-counselor basis, then you can optionally change the scorecard line item to count milestone records, instead. Keep in mind that this is NOT the way that SBA will track this metric, and, as such, you should only do this for goaling your individual counselors. You can create the following line item which can provide you with per-counselor milestone tracking:

Again, it should be noted that this custom line item allows you to create goals on a per-counselor basis but it is not using the same methodology to track business start impact as what is used within Nexus. Because milestone can be added/deleted independent from what is happening on the client record, there is a chance that the two methodologies deviate from each other and thus create different results.

Line Item 4: Jobs Created (Full and part-time)

As noted in the introduction of this FAQ, some line items on this scorecard are dependent upon new logic introduced in Neoserra on September 30, 2018. This particular line item can only be calculated for reporting periods after September 30, 2018.

For this line item, Neoserra compares the number of employees reported in the last session of the reporting period to the number of employees reported in the last session prior to the start of said reporting period. If there were no jobs reported in the prior period, but there was job growth in the current period, then Neoserra will measure the change that took place in the current period. If the difference is a negative number, then jobs created will be zero.

As of October 1, 2018 SBA requires a prior year look-back in order to calculate this line item. For this reason, Neoserra was enhanced, as of September 30, 2018 with a new employee tracking table. The employee tracking table shows the total number of employees on any given date. While some data points may be shown prior to September 30th, the comparison will only work on scorecards with a start date after September 30, 2018:

Note: This line item does not look at milestone records.

Line Item 5: Jobs Retained

This line item is also dependent upon the Neoserra job tracking table and thus can only reliable be run with reporting dates after September 30, 2018.

This line item looks at jobs retained as the total number of employees reported in the last session prior to the start of the reporting period and the last session of the current reporting period. For new clients, not existing in the prior reporting period, the employees reported in the first session of the reporting period will be used. Since this all sounds like a lot of hogwash, we created the following table to help illustrate. The number shown in green is always the lower number and will be used as jobs retained:

Total Employees last reporting period Total Employees current period Total Employees Retained
10 10 10
10 8 8
10 12 10

The most important thing to realize is that this scorecard line item is calculated by Neoserra on the fly. It is not based upon milestones! In fact, the Jobs Retained milestone is essentially obsolete with respect to SBA reporting. Administrators could inactivate this milestone, unless you need to track jobs retained differently for your other stakeholders. But for SBA's purposes, this milestone can be ignored. SBA essentially considers all jobs that the client carries over from a prior period to the current period as jobs retained.

Line Item 6: Jobs Supported

This line item was introduced in 2018 by SBA and is defined by SBA as the sum of jobs created line item and jobs retained line item. Again, this calculation is dependent upon the jobs tracking tables and thus cannot be calculated prior to September 30, 2018. Since this line item is a summation of Jobs Created plus Jobs Retained, this line item does not support the audit feature within the scorecard. If you wish to audit this line item then you will need to audit Jobs Created and then separately audit Jobs Retained.

Total Employees last reporting period Total Employees current period Total Employees Retained Total Jobs Created Total Jobs Supported
10 10 10 0 10
10 8 8 0 8
10 12 10 2 12

When you restrict your scorecard to a single counselor, this line item will report all jobs supported for those clients counseled for whom the counselor is the primary counselor on the client record. In other words, if Jane Doe is the primary counselor for XYZ company, but counselor John Smith counseled this client, then, when you run the scorecard for Jane Doe, she will get credit for the Jobs Supported, even if she herself did not counsel XYZ company. John Smith, other the other hand, will not get credit for these Jobs Supported. The reason Neoserra looks at the primary counselor is to avoid double counting of Jobs Supported when a client is counseled by multiple counselors, and ultimately, this line item is really designed to track Jobs Supported across the network as a whole.

Line Item 7 & 8: Change in Sales

Effective September 30, 2018 Neoserra was enhanced with a sales tracking table on the client record. Neoserra uses this table to determines the change in sales as reported in line item #7 calculation. It is important to note, that the scorecard calculation only takes into account what is tracked on the client record, this line item does not pull from the milestone record.

Neoserra will report the positive difference between the latest sales data in the current reporting period and the sales value reported in the prior period assuming the client had sales values in the prior period. As per the SBA OED Terms, Definitions and Calculations document, clients must have received service in the previous reporting period in order to be included in this calculation and only positive growth is recognized:

Unfortunately, no new definition for Change in Sales has been provided in 2023, with the advent of Nexusa. However, based upon our testing, it has been determined that the Nexus CRMA dashboard includes all increases in sales, regardless of whether the client had activity and sales in the prior year, or not. Line item 8 captures all sales growth with clients during the reporting period as recorded within the Milestone record in Neoserra.

Line Items 11-23: Capital Infusion Data

The next section includes loan and equity data as broken down as follows:

SBA Loans

The first two line items under the Capital Infusion section track the number and dollar amount of approved loans given to your clients by SBA during the reporting period. Neoserra looks to capital funding records for this information. The capital funding type must be marked as "SBA Loan" in the global configuration settings, and the record must have a status of "Approved"

Non-SBA Loans

These line items track the number and dollar amount of approved other than SBA loans during the reporting period. The approved types of loans that might be considered include:

  • Commercial Loan
  • Line of Credit
  • Micro-Loan
  • Other Federal Loan
  • Any other user-defined capital funding type that is marked as "Regular Loan"

Total Loans

Next, you will see the total numbers and dollar amounts of all approved loans, SBA and non-SBA alike, for the reporting period.

Equity Capital

These line items total the number and dollar amount of equity capital capital fundings given to your clients during the reporting period. Neoserra looks to capital funding records for this information PLUS any SBIR or STTR contract awards that have been entered into Neoserra. Effective 10/1/24 SBA formally stated that SBIR/STTR contracts should be considered equity. You can either continue to use the Neoserra Contract Awards module to track SBIR/STTR contracts or you can create your own SBIR/STTR Capital Funding Type and make sure to configure it NOT to be a loan.

In addition to the criteria listed previously, a capital funding record must also meet the following criteria in order for it to be included here:

  • The capital funding type must be "Owner Investment," "Stock Investment," "Venture Capital," "Other Equity Investment," or a user-defined capital funding type that is not marked as "SBA Loan," or "Regular Loan," in the global configuration settings
  • The capital funding record must have a status of "Approved"

Total Capital Infusion

The next line items total the number and dollar amount of both loans and equity capital received by your clients during the reporting period.

Line item 23 provides a percentage of clients who obtained capital infusion during the reporting period divided by the total number of clients who received capital infusion counseling during the same period.

Line Items 21-23: Government Contract Awards

Next, the scorecard generates the government contract awards reported by your clients and recorded in the Neoserra database. Prime and Sub-contract contract awards are included. As noted above, the SBIR and STTR contract awards are included as part of the equity line item.

Line Items 27-44: Counseling and Training Data

The next section specifically looks at counseling sessions and training sessions. It breaks down as follows:

Clients Counseled

Neoserra provides two client calculations. Total Clients Counseled, represents the number of unique clients that received any type of reportable initial/followup counseling and/or capital funding during the reporting period; while the number of New Clients Counseled, represents unique clients that received an initial counseling session during the reporting period. If the client receives counseling from two different programs in your database, then it is feasible that the client received an initial counseling session with two different funding source designations. In other words, the client may have multiple initial sessions. The client will be included in this line item if any initial counseling session falls within the reporting period and meets the funding source and centers specified in the definition.

Note: An initial or follow-up counseling session must meet the following criteria in order for its recipient to be counted as a counseled client: 1) its Reportable? check box must be selected, (2) the date in its Date field must fall within the reporting period, (3) it must be categorized under the funding and sub-funding sources specified in the scorecard definition, (4) it must be assigned to the center (or one of the centers) specified in the scorecard definition, and (5) if the report's output is restricted to a single counselor, it must be assigned to the counselor specified in the scorecard definition.

Client Hours

Total Client Hours, represents the total amount of hours spent counseling clients. New Client Hours, represents the total amount of hours spent counseling ne clients.

Note: Both heading line items only consider preparation and contact hours associated with a counseling session

Average Hours

The next two line items will calculate the average hours each client is counseled and the average hours per session. Again, only prep and contact time are taken into consideration. The difference between these two line items is best shown with a table:

Session 1 Client A Session 2 Client A Session 1 Client B Session 2 Client B Average Hours
Per Client		 Average Hours
Per Session
2 hours 2 hours 3 hours 3 hours 5 (=10 hours/2 clients) 2.5 (=10 hours/4 sessions)

Total Counselor Hours

This line item represents the total number of counseling hours (prep + contact) logged by counselors during the reporting period. Because of the ability to assign multiple counselors to the same counseling session record and/or the ability to assign multiple clients to the same counseling session record, this number is not necessarily the same as the total client hours. For example, if two counselors each counsel a client for 1.5 hours, three hours total will get logged for counselors under this heading (1.5 hours for each of them), but only 1.5 hours gets logged for the client.

Long Term Clients

Long-term counseling clients are defined as having received 5 or more hours of counseling (including preparation time) within the current fiscal year. For the purposes of this particular heading, the current fiscal year is based upon the fiscal year as defined by the Neoserra system administrator under the Neoserra General Settings. This configuration option, titled Fiscal year start month can be accessed by administrators in admininstrator-mode from the Administration|Configuration menu.

It should be noted that, in addition to meeting the criteria listed in the previous paragraph, counseling session records, in order for them to contribute to a client's counseling hours, must also (1) have the Reportable? check box selected, (2) be categorized under the funding and sub-funding sources specified in the scorecard definition, (3) be assigned to the center (or one of the centers) specified in the scorecard definition, and (4) if the report's output is restricted to a single counselor, be assigned to the counselor specified in the scorecard definition.

Total Training Events, Sessions, & Attendees

In order for a training event record to be considered under these headings, it must:

  • Have a Status that is not "Canceled" or "Postponed"
  • Have the Reportable? check box selected
  • Have a date in the Reporting Datefield that falls within the reporting period
  • Be categorized under the funding and sub-funding sources specified in the scorecard definition
  • Be assigned to the center (or one of the centers) specified in the scorecard definition
  • Have an instructor designated in the Instructor field that matches the counselor specified in the scorecard definition (only applicable if the report's output is restricted to a single counselor)

The first training line item tracks the total number of training events (via training event records) that took place during the reporting period.

Next, we see the total number of sessions that took place for these training events (as entered into the Number of Sessions field found in each training event record).

The number of attendees for these training events is pulled directly from the Total Attendees field found in each training event record. Attendees that attend multiple events will be counted for each event. In other words, if Jane Doe attends three qualifying events, then she will be counted three times in this line item calculation.

The number of unique clients who attended your training events would only count Jane Doe once, even if she attended three separate events. This line item requires you to capture client details for each of your training attendees as discussed in this FAQ. If Jane Doe and John Smith from company X both attend one of your events, they will also only be counted as one client. If Mary Roe attends one of your events and she does not have a corresponding client record (active or inactive), then she will not be included in this line item at all. Pre-clients are also excluded from this line item calculation.

Total Training Event Hour counts the number of hours that the instructor spends teaching the training event, whereas Total Training Attendee Hours calculates the total event hours multiplied by the total number of attendees.

Total Clients Served/Advised

These last few line items are slightly different for SBDCs and WBCs based upon the definitions provided by SBA:

As shown above, the "Unique Clients Served" line item includes all clients counseled and or trained during the reporting period. It should be noted that a client record must exist for the attendees of your training event in order for them to be included in either line item calculation. It is recommended that you capture company details for all your attendees as discussed in this FAQ. Pre-clients are not included in this line item calculation, the client record can be either active or inactive.

The "Unique Clients Advised" line item does not take training attendance nor capital funding into consideration and only looks to see if a client has been counseled during the period.

Last, but certainly not least, the line item titled: "Unique Clients Served in Underserved Communities (NOFO Definition)" includes all clients that were either counseled or trained during the period or who received capital funding, and who are marked as being part of the underserved community on the client record. To learn more about the ways Neoserra tracks members of the underserved community, please refer here.

It is important to realize that Nexus uses a different definition for underserved as you can see in the screenshot above. In particular, the Nexus definition does not take tribal affiliation into account, nor clients who are located in areas with persistent poverty. Nor does the Nexus definition allow the client to indicate that they have suffered from systemic inequality. The second line item titled: "Unique Clients Served in Underserved Communities (Nexus Definition)" includes all clients that were either counseled or trained during the period or who received capital funding, and who meet any of the following criteria:

  • LGBTQ+ Yes
  • Primary Contact Disabled? Yes
  • Primary Contact Gender: Female
  • Primary Contact Hispanic Origin: Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin
  • Primary Contact Military Status: Active Duty,Military Spouse,National Guard,National Guard - Active Duty,Reservist,Reservist - Active Duty
  • Primary Contact Race: Alaska Native,Asian,Black or African American,Middle Eastern,Multiracial,Native American,Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander,North African
  • Primary Contact Veteran Status: Service-Disabled Veteran,Veteran
  • USDA RBS Rural Location? Yes

It should be noted that these last four line items of the scorecard are based upon your database as a whole, and thus cannot be run for a single counselor. In other words, when you restrict your scorecard to a single counselor, these line items will nonetheless include all clients served database-wide.

When restricting the scorecard to a center, then the center restriction will be applied both to the client's home center and the activity of that client. In other words, the calculation will only include clients who exist under the specified center record(s) and who have had either training and/or counseling under those specified center(s).



Want more? Browse our extensive list of Neoserra FAQs.