The second round of funding for the major coronavirus rescue program aimed at small businesses started heading out the door on Monday. The initial $349 billion allocated to it was exhausted in just ten days, leaving many businesses all over the country frozen out. That initial dash for cash led to story after story about the program being a boondoggle.

Some of the criticisms are totally legit. Others, though, are a bit overblown or end up misplacing the true blame for what went wrong. I’m going to try to untangle it all in seven points below:

1. What are we talking about? The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), as the major small business rescue program is officially known, is meant to provide low-interest loans of up to $10 million to struggling small businesses under the auspices of the Small Business Administration (SBA). If seventy-five percent of the money a company receives goes toward paying employees, the loan turns into a grant and doesn’t have to be repaid.

This is a crucial point that is often glossed over in critical coverage: the loan has to be repaid if it doesn’t wind up mostly going toward worker pay. There’s also a loose requirement that companies demonstrate some sort of economic need for the program.

A large part of the misunderstanding about this program, I think, is definitional. Most of us envision the local dry cleaners or mom and pop hardware store when we think of a “small business.” But the government’s definition is very different.

For most industries, having under 500 employees qualifies a business as “small,” while in others, the limit extends up to 1,500 employees. And some industries have no employee standard at all, merely an annual level of receipts that for many sectors is in the millions of dollars.