Owner of a profitable LLC or S-Corp, taking reasonable salary plus distributions, QBI deduction, solo 401k or SEP-IRA, mixing personal and business finances.
SB-01 is the reasonable-compensation archetype: pass-through owners splitting income between W-2 salary and distributions to manage IRC §1402 self-employment tax while staying inside the §199A QBI deduction and IRC §162 reasonable-comp guardrails.
SB-01 exists because the S-Corp pass-through structure creates a uniquely dense testing surface that neither the W-2 employee corpus nor the schedule-C sole-proprietor corpus exercises. Owners pay themselves a W-2 salary, draw the remainder as distributions, and IRS scrutiny under Rev. Rul. 74-44 and David E. Watson v. United States targets owners who under-pay salary to avoid FICA. Layered on top: IRC §199A QBI deduction with the W-2-wage limitation and unadjusted-basis-immediately-after-acquisition (UBIA) limitation that kick in at the §199A(b)(2) thresholds, IRC §1402 self-employment tax (which an S-Corp shields from on distributions but an LLC taxed as a partnership does not), basis tracking on the §1366 K-1 stock-and-debt basis worksheets, and accountable-plan reimbursements under Treas. Reg. §1.62-2 for the home-office and auto deductions that personal returns mishandle.
The structural story is a household with median income around $182k drawn from a profitable closely-held operating business, median net worth approaching $1M, and the balance sheet split between liquid assets ($327k median) and a less-liquid ownership stake. Retirement planning runs on Solo 401(k) or SEP-IRA — the Solo 401(k) employer contribution capped at 25% of W-2 wages is itself a function of the reasonable-comp decision, so the tax-software and advisor-tooling reasoning loop is tight. Mixed personal-and-business finance is the recurring data-quality issue: credit-card carries from both sides of the entity wall, and bookkeeping software has to disentangle them.
SB-01 sits between SB-02 (solo practitioner, often Schedule C with no S-Corp election) and SB-03 (multi-member partnership with K-1 guaranteed payments and partnership-tax complexity). The S-Corp election plus the W-2-and-distribution dual-income posture is the diagnostic feature; without the election, the household belongs in SB-02 or A-04. With multiple owners and a partnership-tax filing, the household belongs in SB-03.
Aggregated across the 15 SB-01 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
William is the single-owner SB-01 file that tests the loneliest corner of reasonable-comp: no spouse to split income with, a single-class-of-stock entity, and a $182k gross-income figure that is itself a split between a W-2 line and a distribution line that downstream software must distinguish. Retirement is off track because the Solo 401(k) employer contribution is capped at 25% of his W-2 wages — pushing more into distributions to reduce FICA tightens the retirement-plan ceiling. The debt-payoff goal is on track because cash flow is healthy; the diagnostic is the structural tradeoff between FICA savings and qualified-plan capacity.
Every SB-01 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Tax-software platforms use SB-01 for 1120-S preparation flows — Schedule K and K-1 generation, shareholder-basis worksheets, §199A QBI deduction with W-2-wage and UBIA limitations, and the SSTB phaseout logic. Wealth and retirement-plan platforms use it for Solo 401(k) employer-contribution calculation tied to W-2 wages, plus the reasonable-comp-driven contribution-capacity tradeoff. Bookkeeping and ledger products use it for accountable-plan reimbursement workflows, owner-draw versus distribution coding, and the personal-business co-mingling cleanup that defines real-world S-Corp accounting. Compliance teams testing financial-account-aggregation reconcile shareholder K-1 figures against personal tax returns.
SB-01 is the S-Corp-elected pass-through owner with a single entity. Multi-entity holding-company structures, qualified subchapter S subsidiaries (QSubs), and ESOP-owned S-Corps are excluded by design — those belong in the broader SB-03 or P-02 (Established Business Owner) corpora. Owners taking only distributions and zero W-2 salary are deliberately not modeled here because that posture invites IRS audit and isn't representative of a sustainable steady state. Real-estate-rental-only LLCs that elected S-Corp status (uncommon and usually disadvantageous because of §469 implications) are out of scope — those belong in MB-03. Specified service trade or business (SSTB) owners deep into the §199A phaseout are present but not specifically over-sampled; if SSTB phaseout behavior is the test, consider the SB-02 corpus which over-indexes professional services.
Income and net-worth bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to IRS SOI tabulations of 1120-S filings and BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages for small-employer industries, with state concentration in TX / NJ / OK reflecting both genuine S-Corp prevalence and a sampling choice to surface no-state-income-tax versus state-income-tax planning. Reasonable-comp ratios are realistic but not tied to a specific year's RC reports benchmark study. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the corpus is FROZEN — the priors above describe synthesis intent rather than auditable distribution fits. §199A thresholds and phaseout ranges reflect the statute as enacted; year-specific inflation adjustments are not asserted.
SB-02 is the solo practitioner without S-Corp election — Schedule C, full self-employment tax, no W-2/distribution split. Use SB-02 when the diagnostic is the §1402 SE-tax surface rather than reasonable-comp.
SB-03 is the multi-member partnership with K-1 guaranteed payments, capital-account tracking, and partnership-tax complexity. Reach for SB-03 when there is more than one owner.
A-04 is the early-stage small-business owner where the business hasn't reached steady-state profitability. Use A-04 when the operating loss or low-income profile is the test.
P-02 is the established business owner at higher net-worth tiers with more complex equity, deferred-comp, and succession-planning surfaces. Reach for P-02 when the household is past the reasonable-comp sweet spot and into estate planning.
SB-01 — LLC / S-Corp Owner (Pass-Through) represents profitable closely-held businesses taxed under subchapter S, with the owner taking a W-2 salary plus pro-rata distributions. It is the archetype for reasonable-compensation testing, §199A QBI deduction with W-2-wage limitations, Solo 401(k) capacity, and shareholder-basis tracking.
The 15 shipped SB-01 households have a combined gross income median of $181,523 (25th–75th: $150,648–$204,635). Median net worth is $917,968 with median liquid net worth of $326,859; the remainder is concentrated in business-ownership equity that does not appear on personal liquidity reports.
SB-01 has an S-Corp election in effect — owner pays a W-2 salary, takes distributions, and shields a portion of profit from §1402 self-employment tax. SB-02 is the unelected solo practitioner on Schedule C where the full net income is subject to SE tax. The reasonable-comp testing surface only exists in SB-01.
Yes. The income distribution clusters around and above the §199A(b)(2) threshold so that products can exercise the W-2-wage limitation, UBIA limitation, and SSTB phaseout logic. Specific SSTB classification is a downstream computation against the household's industry attribute.
Yes — credit-card balances appear in every household and the corpus is structured to surface the typical S-Corp data-quality problem of personal-and-business co-mingling that bookkeeping software must disentangle. Accountable-plan reimbursement testing relies on this pattern.
No. The shipped v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift confirmed 2026-05-09). Improvements land in a future v4 release with per-archetype golden fixtures in CI.
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