the accountants just classified it as a reimbursed expense. you just comp yourself the exact same amount as the payroll and it isn't taxed as income.
in general accountants have ways of dealing with all sorts of edge cases, but you need to keep REALLY good documentation and notes about what/why/how, etc. "i thought the bank was going to collapse, and then it did" is a pretty good reason.
wiring yourself the money and moving it to a new business bank account would have been perfectly fine too - you're simply moving the cash to another location. in fact i'm pretty sure that's what most people who got their money out of svb did - very few small businesses have multiple checking accounts.
As others have noted it's not embezzlement/commingling and given the scenario "Wire out from SVB corp account to personal, document exact amount, and wire back to corp $NEWBANK a week/days later, document again" would hardly cause any heartburn now or down the road. Many would see it as responsible, proactive, and heroic.
Depending on the amount the only issue would likely come from your personal bank - I know of people with ~$10m at SVB and I have to imagine all of sudden wiring those kinds of funds to a personal account with an average daily balance that's a fraction of that would raise some alarms on the personal account - or maybe not as I can imagine the big big banks (BoA, etc) probably saw a lot of this on Thursday...
(I am pretty confident there will be at least 250k + 50% advance-dividend early this week, and still optimistic but far from certain that a buyer will take the whole thing and it will be 100%. Last time people actually took losses of 50% above the FDIC amount (100k at the time) was 2008 (IndyMac).)
My startup has about $25k in SVB - but we don't have payroll and I have personal access to that without impacting me if push came to shove (paying contractors, etc). I was aware of the situation and probably could have gotten the funds out but I knew we were well below the FDIC threshold and just didn't want to bother with it (frankly). I would have had more anxiety executing the wire and waiting for it to show up on the other side...
Speaking personally I'm actually kind of curious to see what the FDIC process looks like - in the grand scheme of things it makes you part of a relatively small club! While I know people are suffering and the situation is a lot worse for many I'm actually looking forward to telling the story when appropriate.
The general population is already fascinated by startups and I've had more than a few "civilian" friends reach out to me asking about the SVB situation. When I tell them we're kind of impacted but not really they just kind of chalk it up to another "Wow, startup life is so wild even THE BANK failed".
Additionally I'd say the same - through various startups I've worked with SVB for over 15 years and the people have always been great (systems not so much).
I’m comfortable doing exactly as GP described to make payroll.
If documented its no problem and not uncommon at all in Germany.
In fact many business owners pay something like credit card bills personally and reimburse through the company later.
What is weird/scary (especially when not documented clearly and in advance) is moving your entire bank balance into a personal account. Aside from government/tax/legal, you'd have your investors (in a venture/angel backed company) to justify it to. It's justifiable in this truly exceptional case of SVB imploding and no other bank account being available. (It gets harder to justify in a larger company with lots of investors and more money involved; moving a $100mm balance in a company where you were down to 10% ownership to a personal account even in this situation would be weird AF and depending on the banks involved might cause you problems. I probably still would have emailed counsel and investors/etc. on thursday morning to ask what to do; likely would have sent it to lawyers to handle actually in the huge-account situation.)
Now you've got a weird thing to explain and no vindication.
Generally the law handles this through the "reasonable man" standard; i.e. "would a reasonable man, knowing what you did at the time, have done what you did?" This would allow you to shoot someone in self-defense who was holding a realistic looking toy gun at a child (which you believed to be a real gun, unlawful intent, etc. at the time).
Other threads over the past few days scoffed at having 100-200k in cash available.
the people with less money are much more vocal about it, for obvious reasons.
It is a bimodal distribution of (1) the lucky ones and (2) the ones either "not yet lucky" ones (1/10) or the "never lucky"ones (9/10).
I find it refreshing to hear stories about how things did _not_ work out (from the sources). It is much harder to get the real stories behind the successes because people tend not to ascribe things to luck but create some story after the fact in the same way, as they say, "the winner writes the history".
in other words, if you ascribe success to nothing in particular other than luck, why do you put more stock in the negative case? couldn't failure be caused by nothing other than bad luck?
reading failure stories to look for what to avoid might not be the right strategy if you believe in a world where luck dominates.
I call B.S.
Something doesn't add up. Coming from an anon account no less.
FWIW, Just looked at the screenshot of the wire completion and it does say "Same day". But I did it at after 8pm. Anyway, I felt I did the safest thing to keep the staff from freaking out and for me not to be too stressed through the weekend. I'll have enough headaches moving banks the next two weeks to also be worried about payroll.
You are learning a lot and sounds like you figured out a way to not have your employees see any hiccup. Well done.
Thank you for replying and providing more info.
Nowadays one must assume ChatGPT bot/shill when talking to a new account.
Securing alternative funding for your payroll makes sense and is commendable.
The bank was closed on Friday, and at the time an announcement was made that the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara would open with all insured deposits on Monday (this will not happen if between now and Monday a buyer is found and that bank instead takes over operations on Monday.) There’s not really a “disbursement” of insured funds, just a transfer to a new bank, which may or may not be run by the Federal government.
For uninsured funds, the announced plan (which also might be cancelled if a bank takeover provides better terms for them) is to provide an initial dividend during the week, and a “receivership certificate” for any remaining uninsured balances. Most likely (given history) a bank takeover would also preserve uninsured balances as normal deposits at the new bank; but that’s not guaranteed.