July 11, 2026

Business Bankruptcy Intake Forms: The Fields That Actually Matter

A business owner calls your office. He has 14 employees, two maxed-out credit lines, a landlord threatening eviction, and the IRS wants to talk about four quarters of unpaid payroll tax. He tells you he needs to "shut it down." What he actually needs is for someone to ask him about 40 things he has not thought about yet, and he needs those questions asked in order, on paper, before anyone files anything.

That is the job of a business bankruptcy intake form. Not a generic questionnaire that asks for a name and a debt total. A form that walks the attorney through every data point required to determine whether this is a Chapter 7 liquidation, a Chapter 11 reorganization, a Subchapter V small business case, or something that should not be filed at all until several other problems are fixed first.

I designed these forms as a practicing attorney, and I built them around the intake process I actually use. Here is what needs to be on the form and why each section exists.

Entity Information and Formation Details

Before you can determine which chapter applies, you need to know what kind of entity you are dealing with. A sole proprietor files as an individual and has access to Chapter 13. A corporation or LLC files its own petition and does not. That distinction alone can change the entire strategy, and you need it answered in the first two minutes of the consultation.

Your form should capture the entity type (LLC, corporation, partnership, sole proprietorship), the state of formation, the EIN, the principal business address, and every DBA or trade name the business has used. The petition requires all names used in the prior eight years, and a creditor who knows the business as "Bayshore Plumbing" will not get notice if the petition only lists "BSP Services LLC." You also need the date of formation, because a business formed six months ago that is already insolvent raises red flags the court and trustee will want explained.

Chapter Filing: 7, 11, and Subchapter V

Chapter selection for a business is not driven by a means test the way consumer cases are. It is driven by whether the business has going-concern value — whether it is worth more alive than dead.

For Chapter 7, you need to know if the business has already stopped operating or if operations are winding down. A Chapter 7 trustee liquidates assets and distributes the proceeds to creditors. There is no reorganization, no plan, no fresh start for the entity. The business closes. For many small business owners, this is the right answer, but you cannot make that call without knowing the asset picture and the debt structure.

For Chapter 11, you need to know whether the business can generate enough revenue to cover operating expenses if the debt burden is restructured. That means capturing current monthly revenue, operating costs, and whether the business is cash-flow positive before debt service. A business that loses money on operations — not just after debt payments, but on the actual work of selling goods or services — is not a Chapter 11 candidate. No plan will be confirmable if the numbers do not work.

Subchapter V changed the math for a lot of small businesses. It removed the creditor committee requirement, simplified plan confirmation, and let business owners keep their equity even if unsecured creditors take a haircut. But eligibility depends on the total amount of noncontingent, liquidated debt. Your intake form needs to capture enough debt detail to make that determination before you advise the client on which path to pursue.

Creditors: Secured, Unsecured, and Priority

A consumer debtor might have 15 creditors. A business debtor might have 150. Your form needs space for all of them, organized by type, because the category determines how the debt is treated in every chapter.

Secured creditors hold collateral. The bank with a lien on the equipment, the SBA with a UCC filing on all assets, the landlord's statutory lien for unpaid rent in states that allow it. For each secured creditor, capture the creditor name, balance owed, collateral description, and monthly payment. In a Chapter 11, you will need this to determine whether the debtor can propose a plan that pays secured claims over time while retaining the collateral.

Unsecured creditors are the trade vendors, the credit card companies, the service providers who did work and have not been paid. These are the claims that get reduced in a Chapter 11 plan and eliminated in a Chapter 7 discharge (though entities do not receive a discharge in Chapter 7 — the case just closes after liquidation). Capture creditor name, amount, and whether the debt is disputed.

Priority claims — unpaid wages owed to employees, trust fund taxes withheld but not remitted, certain tax obligations — must be paid in full in any Chapter 11 plan before unsecured creditors receive anything. If the priority claims are large enough, they can make a plan unfeasible on their own. You need this number at intake.

Assets and Liabilities: The Full Picture

Business asset schedules are nothing like consumer schedules. You are not listing a house and a car. You are cataloging an operating enterprise, and the categories matter for valuation, lien analysis, and cash collateral questions.

Real property owned by the business — the warehouse, the retail space, the vacant lot the owner bought ten years ago — needs to be listed with fair market value and outstanding mortgage balance. Vehicles and equipment get the same treatment: year, make, description, value, and outstanding loan. But you also need accounts receivable (with aging, because a 120-day-old receivable is worth less than a 30-day-old one), inventory (at both cost and liquidation value), and any intellectual property or proprietary assets. A customer list, a trademark, a proprietary software tool — these are assets that creditors and trustees care about, even if the owner does not think of them as "property."

Tax Obligations and Payroll

This is where business bankruptcies get dangerous for the business owner personally. Payroll taxes — the income tax and FICA you withhold from employee paychecks — are trust fund obligations. The business holds that money in trust for the government, and if it does not get remitted, the IRS does not just pursue the entity. It pursues the responsible person individually. That is usually the owner, but it can be the bookkeeper, the controller, anyone with authority over payroll disbursement.

Your intake form must capture every unpaid payroll tax period, every unfiled payroll return, and who had check-signing authority on the payroll account. If there are four quarters of unpaid 941 taxes, the owner needs to understand that the entity's bankruptcy does not make that personal liability go away. Same with collected but unremitted sales tax — most states treat it the same way.

On the payroll side, capture the number of employees, payroll frequency, the last funded payroll date, and whether any employees are owed wages. Unpaid wages are priority claims, and if you have 20 employees owed two weeks each, that priority block shapes the entire case.

Recent Transfers and Insider Payments

The trustee or debtor-in-possession will scrutinize every payment made in the 90 days before filing (one year for insiders). Any payment that gave a creditor more than it would have received in a Chapter 7 liquidation is an avoidable preference under Section 547. In a business context, this often means the owner paid a family member back for a loan, or accelerated payments to a favored vendor while other creditors waited.

Your form should ask specifically about transfers to family members, officers, directors, and related entities in the prior year. It should also ask about any property sold below market value and any distributions to owners — dividends, draws, bonuses, or management fees — in the prior two years. These are the facts that generate adversary proceedings, and you want to know about them before the trustee does.

Prior Bankruptcy Filings

Has the entity filed before? Has the owner filed personally? Prior filings affect eligibility and create presumptions. A case dismissed within one year before a new filing limits the automatic stay to 30 days, and a second dismissal within one year can eliminate the stay entirely. If the owner filed a personal Chapter 7 and received a discharge, that discharge does not cover personally guaranteed business debts unless those debts were scheduled in the personal case.

Capture dates, case numbers, districts, and outcomes for every prior filing by the entity or any insider.

Why a Purpose-Built Form Matters Here

A consumer bankruptcy intake form will not work for a business case. The entity structure questions are different. The asset categories are different. The creditor analysis is different. The tax exposure is different. And the personal guarantee overlay — where the owner's individual financial life intersects with the entity's collapse — does not appear on any consumer form because it does not apply there.

I built the business bankruptcy intake set for the attorneys who handle these cases, and I structured it around the actual sequence of analysis: entity first, chapter determination second, assets and liabilities third, tax and payroll fourth, transfers and preferences last. If you also handle the commercial litigation that often precedes a business bankruptcy or the corporate formation work that sometimes follows one, those intake forms follow the same structure and design. The full set of legal intake forms covers 38 practice areas.