It is no secret that the last year has been difficult. Juggling covid, kids, and careers has left even the most “together” individuals frazzled. Articles abound with news of how women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. With this in mind, I wanted to see how this affected Woman Owned Businesses’ performance in the GovCon space and what that impact looked like.

Using GovTribe Reports, I compared the number of prime, federal contract awards that were designated as set aside for Woman Owned Small Business (WOSB), Woman Owned Small Business Sole Source, and Economically Disadvantaged Woman Owned businesses (EDWOSB)…

In case you missed it, I had a webinar discussion with my friend Dan Rusert at Jamis Software on March 5. We talked about DCAA compliant accounting in the context of growing a federal contracting business.

When contractors enter into agreements to provide goods and services to the Government, they must follow government acquisition guidance and regulations. The Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) is the agency responsible for ensuring compliance with these regulations.

In so doing, the DCAA conducts both standard and periodic audits of various types on both prime contractors and subcontractors. In this webinar, we discussed the nature of these audits, the various ways a federal contractor can achieve DCAA compliance, and the benefits, challenges, and process for moving to an accounting ERP system designed for DCAA compliance.

For a recent article from Yahoo Finance, GovTribe provided some procurement data to help illustrate the impact of the 2019 federal government shutdown.

If you are a contractor working with any of the affected agencies, you have likely noticed a reduction in activity over the past month. As you can see in the chart below, the effect is real and dramatic.

The total number of opportunity postings is down by nearly two-thirds across the affected agencies. For some, the reduction is extreme. Procurement activity for USDA and Commerce are down 90 percent.

It’s difficult at this point to guess at the long term impact of a shutdown that lasts for weeks during what is typically a busy time of year for federal procurement. We’ll check back in on this as more information is available.

Click here for the full Yahoo Finance story.

Learn more about GovTribe!

GovTribe has compiled a calendar of small business events and vendor outreach sessions for just about every federal agency — civilian and defense.

You can view the google calendar here and sync it to your own calendar.

Disclaimer:

GovTribe makes no guarantees that this calendar will be perfectly up to date or comprehensive. This event information is scattered across dozens of webpages, and the agencies have no set schedule for posting updates. The details regarding which agencies are covered, and how, are below — along with links back to the sources. I will endeavor to update the calendar quarterly.

Background

Most…

In addition to our comprehensive, live-updating database of federal prime contract award and spending, GovTribe does real time acquisition and integration of subcontract award data.

What is a Subcontract Award?

Subcontracts can be complicated, but here is a simple, high-level description for the uninitiated.

The outcome of every completed federal procurement process is a prime contract award of some kind. A prime contract is awarded to a company, and that company has a contractual relationship (with associated benefits, responsibilities, and liabilities) with the federal government.

Many prime contract awardees, though, have partners. Those partners often have a subcontract relationship with the prime awardee, and receive…

What is an NSN?

A National Stock Number (NSN) is a 13-digit numeric code assigned to every “standardized material item of supply” as recognized by the United States Department of Defense (as well as all NATO countries, and some non-NATO countries). NSNs are assigned to about 13 million products, materials, or components, each with defined specifications and descriptions.

Items assigned an NSN may be directly associated with military equipment such as uniforms, parachutes, vehicles and vehicle components, weapons and ammunition, etc.

NSNs also cover items more generic in use including electronic components, medical equipment, office furniture, industrial goods, bolts and nails, and much, much…

On October 18, 2018, I had a chat with Brendon Dibella from StreetShares and Kevin Jans from the Contracting Officer Podcast and Skyway Acquisition Solutions to discuss recent trends in federal spending.

Specifically, we took a look at disaster response spending trends, in light of another eventful hurricane season, and DOD spending trends given the recent (and significant) budget increases.

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As a reminder, Kevin Jans is a former contracting officer and the founder and host of the Contracting Officer Podcast. …

The General Services Administration announced today it has kicked-off a pilot program designed to assess possible benefits to the federal government, and the federal contracting industry, of making public the information that is currently accessible only via the GSA eBuy portal.

Per their press release:

The one-year eBuy Open GSA First pilot tests the hypothesis that by GSA publicly posting eBuy awards, vendors who do not hold a GSA contract will be better positioned to decide if they want to pursue a GSA contract or subcontracting opportunities.

In short, GSA has started listening to what open data advocates (including GovTribe)…