Lenders participating in the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program are trying to find a balance between speed and diligence.

On the one hand, the banks are working under tight timelines to disburse the relief funds to small businesses ravaged by the COVID-19 outbreak — in some cases bank employees worked through the night and weekend to process PPP applications. On the other hand, banks are working through high volumes of PPP loans that have specific regulatory requirements with what some are calling unclear guidance.

As banks process PPP loans compliantly and quickly, manual processes, along with uncertainty about program details are slowing the process.

For Farm Bureau Bank, which soft-launched its PPP platform Friday evening, the biggest hurdle has been “the unknown of how the program works,” said Mark Cromer, chief operations technology officer.

Farm Bureau is an SBA-approved lender that has not penetrated the small business market very deeply, which has made navigating the specialty PPP loans challenging, Cromer said. “This is such a different deal, everything is manual,” he said. “It’s difficult for us to even think about automation when we don’t know how it’s going to work.” The bank will process the applications manually until it has solidified a process, then hopefully will be “able to backfill with some automation.”

As one of the few banks looking to leverage the program to gain new business customers, Cromer said the Sparks, Nev.-based bank is still navigating the application process. “When you take a look at what the government is wanting us to collect, the series of questions that they ask and the boxes they want people to check, they are things that don’t exist today,” he said. “If we were just going to be providing this to our current customers, we could streamline that. Since we’re using this program to get new customers, we’re looking to collect a whole package of information.”

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Farm Bureau, which operates in 41 states and had $769 million in assets at yearend 2018, is not the only small bank struggling with the lack of government guidance. Despite standing up a platform for PPP loans in a matter of days, Happy State Bank’s CEO described the process as chaotic.

“The program started [April 3] and it was chaos. The SBA was changing things midstream and there were contradictory instructions that were creating issues,” said Happy State Bank CEO J. Pat Hickman. “There were just so many unanswered questions. It was chaotic, we were just trying to navigate the system.”

Amarillo, Texas-based Happy Bank formed a “triage group,” Hickman said, dedicated to manually verifying the information on the PPP applications before submitting them to the SBA. “When you have 300 applications coming in at once and you can only put two in at a time, what would happen is, halfway through putting the data in, we’d find an error and would have to start all over again. That would tie up the system,” Hickman said.

Despite having to manually verify the information, adding that step has sped up the application process, Hickman said. He didn’t specify the number of employees in the triage group, other than to say, “it’s huge.” Happy Bank has $3.8 billion in assets and is the 21st-largest bank in Texas.

Boston-based Berkshire Bank, which has $13.2 billion in assets, is using Cirrus Lending Services, a software company focusing on online document management, to automate the intake of PPP loans, according to Greg Poehlmann, senior vice president of 44 Business Capital, Berkshire’s SBA lending arm. Still, the verification process and submission to the SBA’s E-Tran system is manual.

“Manually we had to go in and look at each document, look at the calculations and make sure it made some sort of sense,” Poehlmann said. “You had to put eyes on that, and if someone’s automated that process, God bless them.”

Berkshire Bank has processed 3,000 applications for more than $532 million through the SBA and funded the first application today. It operates 130 branches in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island.