Technical Assistance Annual Report – Template Demonstration

Hi everyone. I will be completing a brief demonstration of the Technical Assistance Annual Reporting Template. So, on screen you should be seeing an Excel report and this is an example of the TA and SBOP 2026 Annual Reporting Template. This is the same template that's used for both programs. So, in this template there are several tabs. There's eight tabs. A few of them are informational and then four of them are specifically for data entry. So, the first tab in the template is called Tool Tips and this covers all of the data elements that are included in the template. So, it'll give you, in column A, the name of the data element. In column B, the tab or the location where you can find that data element. Column C will tell you if this particular data element is required, conditionally required, or optional. In column D, you'll be notified of the type of data that we're requesting. So, if this is alphanumeric, a single, or multi-select dropdown. And then in column E here will be a brief description of that data element. And this is coming directly from the reporting guidance, so you can also reference it there. The next page will be the cover page. So, the cover page provides some summary information of the information that was completed in the template and it will also give you a data validation process that's available in the template. The data validation is a subset of the data validations that are performed on your annual reporting data. This is used as a first preliminary process for you to do some self-review. However, please do note that if, even if your data passes all of the in-template validations, we may still run some additional validations on our side post-submission and may still come back for data resolution. Also note here that if you are running into an issue, you keep getting a failure, and you can't figure out how to resolve that, it should not stop you from submitting your report. You're free and welcome to submit reports with errors and we'll help you resolve those after submission. The final two tabs of the annual report are also informational. You'll have your single-select DV and multi-select DV tabs. And what these are for is for the data elements with option sets. This will give you a list of all of allowable options for each data element. So, for example, relationship to the TA grant, TA grant recipient, sub-recipient, contractor, these are the options for that particular data element. So, you can use these tabs as reference. If you're copying and pasting your data, you can copy and paste from these tabs. Or if you have a system of record, you can use these tabs as reference for the allowable option sets there. And again, this tab will be for the option for the data elements with single-select options, and this tab will be for the data elements with multi-select options. So, the rest of the tabs in this template, provider, eligible beneficiary, TA service, and classroom style, are the data input tabs. The way that the data is collected and reported, we do highly encourage that you enter the data in sequence. So, meaning you'll want to enter your provider information first, then move on to the eligible beneficiary information, then finally the TA services data. The classroom style services data is independent from the rest. But for these three tabs, you'll want to order them and enter the data in sequence. So, starting on the provider tab, these are the data elements that are covered for your TA providers. The TA providers is anyone that is directly providing services to your eligible beneficiary. So, if you have any sort of pass-through entities that are involved in your organization but are not directly providing services to the eligible beneficiaries, those entities do not need to be listed here. If you have reported in prior years, this tab will come populated with your prior year, with the providers that you reported in that prior year. If you have any additional providers that are new to your program, you can just add them onto the list. And if you do, for whatever reason, have a provider that you reported previously that you're no longer working with, that's okay. You can just leave them on there. You don't necessarily need to delete them. So, starting in column A, we're looking for the name of the TA provider. So, please make sure this is the legal name of the entity. Try to avoid using acronyms or any shorthand. And this is a free text. So, you'll just want to type or paste that name in. Moving on to relationship of the TA grant, this is going to be the first single select drop down. So, you can use this little down arrow, and it'll show you your list of options directly in the cell here. You can select from the grant recipient, two different types of sub-recipients, or the TA grant contractor, depending on the relationship of the providing entity to the primary award recipient. For TA provider type, this will be another single select drop down where you can choose if this is a state institution of higher education for a non-profit. If you do select other, you'll notice that column D, other TA provider type, becomes highlighted in yellow. This is an example of a conditionally required column, and you'll need to enter some sort of description of the type of provider if it wasn't falling in one of those other categories. If you did select state institution or for a non-profit institution, you can just go ahead and leave column D blank, like in these first two lines. Column E is going to be the SETI self-certified designation. So, this is the SETI designation of the providing entity. This example is a multi-select column. So, to bring up the options, you'll want to double click on the cell, and that will bring up a pop-up. And from here, you can select one or multiple options from the available list. If you are selecting anything for the SETI designation in category one, you'll want to select category one, and then the sub-category items that are relevant to that. If your providing entity did not designate themselves as SETI, if you don't have any sort of certification from them, please do not leave this blank. You can just select the TA provider did not certify, and that is an allowable option, but don't leave it blank. And if you're copying and pasting data into any of these multi-select data elements, here as example, you'll see that the responses are delineated with semicolons. So, you can copy and paste your data in, and in between each response option, you'll just want to make sure that there's a semicolon here. In column F, you'll report the type of TA services that were provided by this entity. You'll, again, have a multi-select option set here to choose from legal services, accounting services, and financial advisory services. You can select as many options that are applicable for that entity. If you do select anything that includes this other listing, you will be prompted, again, to provide a description of what that other type of services entails. Once you enter some text into that specific cell, you'll notice that the highlighting for conditional requirement is removed. And then finally, in column H, you'll indicate the amount of TA grant funds that were budgeted to this specific provider. And here, we're just looking for a dollar amount. So, once you've completed all of your provider information, you can then move on to the eligible beneficiary data. One of the key reasons that you should complete the provider information first is because of the formatting of column A. So, column A, you're asked to list the provider or the eligible beneficiary that will be in that row. And this is going to be a custom list, a customized list based on the information you've entered in the prior tab. So, as you can see, we have provider A, B, C, example, and example demo. And that lines up with the names of the providers listed here. So, using this dropdown, you can select your TA provider. Again, if you're copying and pasting your data into the template, that's totally fine. Just make sure that the name of your provider on the eligible beneficiary data tab matches exactly to the name of your provider on the provider data tab. Once you've selected your provider, you can move on to entering the eligible beneficiary data information. So, for the eligible beneficiary ID, this is a unique ID for the particular eligible beneficiary. This can be the business name, if that's available, or if you don't have the business name or don't feel comfortable sharing the business name, you can use some sort of alphanumeric code that you're designating for that business in your system. This, again, just needs to be unique for every single eligible beneficiary, and we need to be able to reference this back if we were to ask you questions about the particular eligible beneficiary. So, if you are using an alphanumeric code, you know, you should be able to easily look that up in your system. For eligible beneficiary street address, city, state, and zip code. So, this will be the primary business location for the eligible beneficiary. Of course, if you collected this information, you can enter that as available. However, for some eligible beneficiaries, you may not have the street address or city details. That is okay, but again, please don't leave these fields blank. Instead, you'll want to write none provided, and we'll be able to accept that as a response. Even if you do not have the street or city, you still do need to provide the state and zip code. That is the minimum requirements for the address information. So, go ahead and select the relevant state and enter the zip code. We're looking for a five-digit zip code. We don't need the additional specification beyond that. The next column for the eligible beneficiary data will be the NAICS code. So, again, you can look up in the tooltips here and see that the NAICS code comes from the 2017 or the 2022 NAICS code. Either is allowable. For the NAICS code, we're looking for a six-digit number, and it does need to be provided to five or six digits of specificity. So, you can't just provide a general high-level category. You need to go into a little bit more depth for that particular business. So, for example, while entering 120000 into the template, that won't throw an error in the template, but once we run this through the validations and check against the allowable NAICS codes, this will flag an error since it only has two digits of specificity. So, at minimum, we're going to need five digits of specificity with the zero at the end. It's fine. Just one zero. And the next two columns will cover FTEs and very small business designation. So, again, up in the tooltips and in the reporting guidance, it will give you details on how to calculate the FTEs. So, here we'll just say that this business has 12 FTEs. Since it has more than 10 FTEs, this would not be considered a very small business. And then you have your CETI self-certified business status. So, this is going to have the same option sets as the CETI column on the provider data. This time, it's referencing the eligible beneficiary for the business that is receiving these services. So, again, if you double-click into that cell, you'll see the same options for categories one through five for certifying as a CETI-owned business. If they're not certifying as a CETI-owned business, you'll just want to select this last option, did not certify. And you'll want to remember that for businesses to qualify for the TA services, they need to either be a very small business or be a CETI-owned business. They don't necessarily have to be both, though. And the rest of these columns for eligible beneficiary cover the demographics of the business, minority-owned, women-owned, veteran-owned, and ethnicity. These are, again, often multi-select or single-select drop-downs. And similar to the CETI, if you do not have this demographics information, please do not leave these tab blanks or these cells blank. You'll still want to fill them out. There's a couple different non-response options, either prefer not to respond or the business did not answer, and either one of those you can select. So, you'll want to fill out all of the demographics information for each eligible beneficiary. And then for the last section of the eligible beneficiary data is going to cover small business program referrals. So, once these businesses have received their TA services, of course, they may be referred to capital programs. So, in column U here, this is another multi-select where you can designate if this eligible beneficiary was referred to a program. The options here are an SSBCI-supported lending or equity program. You may also refer them to other small business programs, federal or otherwise. If you did not refer them to, or if your providers did not refer them to a small business program, that is okay. But again, please do not leave this blank. Select NA as the option here. If you did refer them to one or more programs, make that selection, and then you'll see conditionally required to complete the rest of this. So, you'll want to list the name or names of the small business program. Maybe it was one of the SSBCI programs that you operate, and then one of your other state-led programs. And then in referral to source of capital, this is looking at the type of capital that they were referred to. Again, just go ahead and make this selection that best fits the entity that they're referred to. And you can select one or more options. If you select other, again, similar to many other columns in the template, you'll be conditionally required to provide some type of description. And then you'll notice on this line above, if they were not referred to a program, columns V, W, and X, you can leave those blank. And then one final note before we move to the TA Services Data tab. If you have an eligible beneficiary that is working with multiple different providers within your program, you will need to list that eligible beneficiary multiple times, right? So, if we have this particular business or this business, as you see listed above, business name working with provider example and provider A, you'll have to list them twice, two rows on the template, or multiple rows if they're working with several different providers. And then with that, you'll want to ensure that their address information and demographics information is consistent between both rows. So, matching up their IDs, of course, the street address information, information regarding their FTEs, SETI and VSB certifications, as well as all of the demographic details. If your providers had differences in their referral process and either referred or didn't refer that same eligible beneficiary, that is okay if that's different between the same eligible beneficiary across different providers. So, now moving on to the TA Services Data. So far, we've completed all of the providers that are providing services in the program. We've listed out all of the eligible beneficiaries who are receiving services in the program. And then in the TA Service Data tab, you'll want to list all of the instances of the services that they are receiving. So, again, why it was important to fill out those first two provider and EB data tabs first is because columns A and B are going to have those custom dropdown lists for you to select from. So, once again, they'll select the TA provider. And then in column B here, your eligible beneficiary ID. So, for this particular dropdown, it will have a subset of IDs from the prior tab. And those are going to be specific to the provider that it was associated with on the prior tab. So, again, in this case, on the eligible beneficiary data tab for Provider A, we had two businesses that Provider A was providing services for. So, those will be the only two you see listed when you select Provider A. And then you can enter all the information about the services that they were receiving. Primary purpose of the TA service. This is a single select dropdown. Again, if you select other, you'll need to provide a description. And column E is the TA service brief description. There's no specific requirements about how long or short or detailed this needs to be. So, please just use your judgment. If you have a brief description from the provider about the type of services or what was, you know, reviewed in that particular session, you can just copy and paste that or type that into the template here. It does not have to be particularly lengthy or detailed. For the style of the TA services, again, you'll have a single select dropdown, one-on-one, small group, or cohort style services. If you select other, you'll have to provide a brief description. And then in the final column, you're looking at hours for that service that was provided. If you have an eligible beneficiary who is receiving, like, multiple instances of services, but they're essentially the same, right, maybe they had two or three sessions that cover the same primary purpose, the same style from the same provider, you could choose to aggregate all of those hours into a single row if that's easiest for, like, an export from your system or something like that, if you're just manually entering this data. However, if you have the same eligible beneficiary working with different providers, or if you have the same eligible beneficiary receiving different types of services in a different style of services, you will need to enter multiple rows for that given eligible beneficiary with all of the other relevant data. And then finally, the last tab for data entry is the classroom style TA services. So, this tab is a little different from the other three, and it's not connected to the other data that you've entered in the report. So, for classroom style services, if you have, you know, all of the folks that are attending these classroom style events, they do not need to be listed as eligible beneficiaries, or you do not need to record their individual instances of TA services, you can just lump that all together and provide the information here in the classroom style section. If your program is not doing any classroom style services, then you can just leave this whole tab completely blank. So, similar to the individual services instance, the first column will cover the primary purpose of the classroom event, and then same thing, provide a brief description, up to you how much detail you want to provide here. And the final two columns will cover the number of event attendees, as well as the date of the services. Again, since the report is not cumulative, and it covers for 2026 reporting period of April 1st, 2025 through March 31st, 2026, we would expect the date of that classroom event to fall within that range. If you forgot to report prior year events or anything like that, please just reach out and we can correct that on an individual basis. Once you've finished entering all of the data, you can head back to the cover page. You'll want to look at the summary information, make sure that's adding up as you expected, and again, you can run the validations to get a preliminary review of the data you've inputted into the template. If there's an error you can't resolve, please feel free to reach out ahead of the submission deadline, or just go ahead and submit your report, and we'll resolve that with you after submission. Thank you.