Welcome to Top 10 Tuesday – Tips from around the web! I hope you all survived your Monday.
This weeks top 10 articles are from:
Business Blogs:
Social Media Explained in Plain English
Intuit Small Business Blog
Should You Let Your Employees Telecommute? Legal Questions to Consider.
How Does Asset Depreciation Work?
Inc. Magazine
You’ve created a company Facebook page. Now what?
Forbes Magazine
IRS Wins Big in Six Year Audit Push
Journal of Accountancy
A primer for accountants on the ins and outs of using LinkedIn for business purposes
Nerd Enterprises
How to insert videos, images, and formatted text into your Facebook page
Accounting Web
Federal Contracts – Unallowable Costs Explained
One Hour Bookkeeper
Diary of a Bad, Bad Bookkeeper – A Warning Sign
That’s it for this week folks, boy it is really a tough job picking just 10 favorites every week. What were some of your favorite articles/blog posts? Care to share any of them with us?
News from the National Association of Government Contractors
SBA officials announced on Oct. 4 that the agency is setting up procedures to help woman-owned small businesses gain more access to the federal contracting marketplace. A final rule is forthcoming in the Federal Register.
Working with the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council, SBA officials will begin a four-month implementation of the Women-Owned Small Business program. They will be building infrastructure to support the certification process and allowing for ongoing oversight.
Officials say that by early 2011 contracts will begin to become available to small businesses owned by women under the program. Such an initiative has been promised for years to bolster access to women-owned businesses who have been an historically under-represented segment of the government contracting community.
The proposed rule states that the purpose “is to enable contracting officers to identify and establish a sheltered market for competition.”
Under an amended statute, contracting officers can set aside a portion of contracts for women business owners without first giving preference to other types of business.
In SBA’s rule, officials identified over 80 industries in which women would be eligible for federal contract assistance under the new program.
To formulate this list SBA officials used the analysis in a 2007 study commissioned by SBA from the Kauffman-Rand Foundation to identify industries where women are underrepresented.
Apr 16, 2010 -
The first American Express OPEN Victory in Procurement (VIP) Small Business survey was released, reporting on findings from more than 1,500 business owners listed in the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) and registered on the Central Contractor Registration (CCR), the primary vendor database for the federal government.
Including active contractors, currently inactive, and non-contractors1, the survey revealed compelling best practices for small businesses to succeed in government contracting. The two most important pieces of advice that successful contractors offered are to start with small contracts since they can lead to larger opportunities and to be persistent.
Active contractors made an estimated $86,000 investment in time and money in 2009 seeking federal contracts. The median sales for active small business contractors was between $1 and $4.9 million, and federal contracts accounted for 38% of their revenues.
Many small business owners who have not yet won their first prime contract are just getting started. Four in ten (42%) non-contractors have started pursuing federal contracting only recently, having registered on the CCR (a necessary first step in the federal procurement process) in 2008 or later. Thus, many of them will become successful – if they keep bidding – over the next year.
The survey also found that getting on the General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule can be an important strategy for winning federal government business. The GSA Schedule is a list of approved vendors for the products and services the government procures. One-third (34%) of active small business contractors are on the GSA Schedule while only 13% of currently inactive contractors are on it. There is a significant gender difference in the firms who are seeking procurement opportunities through the GSA Schedule: 40% of women business owners who are active contractors are on the GSA Schedule versus 31% of men business owners.
In another marker of success, fully 80% of active small business contractors who are on the GSA Schedule have annual revenues of $1 million or more and derive 47% of their annual revenues – at least $500,000 per year – from federal contracts.
For more information, click here.
Low bidder wins rules set to be altered | Notes from Jim Haughey | Reed Construction Data.
No final plan or timetable has yet been announced. New contracting rules will include all federal contracts not jut construction. So there are likely to be enough objections to delay implementation for quite a few months. As of now you should anticipate new procurement rules for federal bids late this year. New rules will likely apply to state and local government and nonprofit projects with federal financing.
Leaked information suggests that a database will be compiled scoring the social acceptability of the business practices of all potential bidders. Expect your public servants in Washington to contact you for details about pay, healthcare, retirement, sick leave, safety and environmental policies. The social scoring will apply to the whole organization not just the part of the organization that may bid on a federal contract. Materials, design, construction management and other organizations will be covered by the new rules if they want to continue bidding for public contracts.
