Scored some nice adjustable desks for pennies on the dollar.
I'd advise the original poster to wait for a few months. The recession hasn't really hit yet and there are plenty of business closures yet to come. At that point, liquidated office equipment will be a whole lot cheaper because of the glut.
Also, naive question, what happens if you don't do these things? If the company has no assets, it's not like you can get sued? I'm not arguing that this should be done, I'm just curious what the specific reason is that it happens.
If there's a corporation or formal payroll involved, then it's important to wind those down carefully for various legal reasons. So either the remaining assets or owners will have to pay for the paperwork wind down.
Typically with a small company of 50-60 employees, the office manager and 1-2 accountants wll stay on for a few months to wrap all that up.
I was the last eng. employee to leave Novafora/Transmeta, and attended the auction and bought some of the computer equipment.
The most expensive hardware items were the almost new espresso machine, the 3 Ghz scope and the bed of nails tester.
Intel bought most of the IP for a little more than peanuts.
But the biggest benefit to the last remaining employees and board members (particularly those who are Directors or Officers) is reduction in liability around the details of shutting down a business. It's not about the thousands of dollars you get for the office furniture. By the point a company does an ABC, payroll obligations are likely the only category of liabilities to impact any employee still involved.
A firm like Sherwood will in fact readily offload that stuff to the most reputable firm who can haul it away, whatever is most efficient.
It's the forgotten obligation that Sherwood helps protects you from (e.g., rent payment, tons of small bills). When that bill shows up after you have had the hard conversations with stakeholders, that's yet another reminder to your investors that things went south. (Sherwood gets the missed bill and pays it out from a carefully planned escrow and based on a wind-down agreement that your investors signed off on). Much preferable to all of your investors notifying _you_ of an outstanding obligation. Firms like Sherwood play an important role in allowing all of us to move on with life.
There are several details here I'm skimming over that someone at Sherwood would correct me on, but hopefully this is helpful.
Sherwood=good guys who help startup people move on. Hopefully you have your business well-organized. Sherwood has the process down to a science.
[EDIT]: 'who pays for this?' There's typically a negotiation between the remaining creditors with voting rights (your board members at time of wind-down), but the cost of a firm like Sherwood is small compared to the risk of you trying to shut down your startup in your spare time. (Don't do that.)
It is possible to just let it go bankrupt and leave to the appointed administrators to deal with it, but then you have someone with interests not aligned with yours going through all your papers looking for ways to extract value. That's a pretty good incentive for directors to try to ensure an orderly wind-down on their terms.