A veteran-owned small business in the northwest part of the country is waiting for the government to pay them about $20 million in contract invoices.

The company executive, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said their line of credit will only last so much longer before the banks and other creditors come asking for payment.

“Once we hit our limit, we are stuck and the only thing we can do is work with vendors to let them know we are good for money once the government reopens,” the executive said in an interview with Federal News Network. “Once you cross a certain threshold, banks want to see certain things because you are using 80% of your line of credit. They want to know why you’re past due on your receivables, so they want to see reports. Some banks do not understand the government resell process and the fact that we do not operate as a traditional business.”

This IT product reseller, which is located in a Historically Underutilized Business Zone (HUBZone), is one of thousands of companies, both large and small, suffering an extra level of pain during the partial government shutdown.

Not only are firms facing stop work orders, reduced contract scopes or terminations of convenience altogether, but many are waiting to get paid from invoices submitted on or before Sept. 30.

“There isn’t anyone working at the pay centers to approve invoices. A lot of what we do is net 30 stuff that goes through the Invoice Processing Platform (IPP) or other payment portals. We usually submit our invoices and the government approves them, but there isn’t anyone there to do that,” the executive said. “We have one instance where we need additional information before submitting our invoice, but no one is there to give us that information, so can’t submit the invoice. In general, we are submitting invoices and seeing what happens. Then our accounting team is doing outreach after 30 days, and that’s when we are getting bounce backs from emails.”

The company executive said agencies made a lot of purchases on Sept. 30, which means not only are the invoices more than 30 days old, but the vendors they bought from are expecting to get paid regardless of whether or not the government pays first.

“That is creating problems for us in terms of having to make changes and manage cash flow,” the executive said. “The majority of the vendors we deal with know the government space, they are aware of shutdown and they are being friendly about the situation. They aren’t hounding us about past due bills, but with others we are floating the money. We have to use our line of credit or make partial payments to keep them happy.”

Interest penalties accruing

Adding to the challenge of waiting for payments when the government reopens is that vendors are entitled to interest on late payments under the Prompt Payment Act.

The Treasury Department says the interest rate for calendar year 2025 is 4.625%.  This means that the small business which is owed $20 million in outstanding invoices would be owed about $74,000 in interest as of Nov. 10.

This one example is just the tip of the Prompt Payment Interest iceberg that agencies will face when they reopen.

Tim Soltis, a former federal financial management executive who worked at the Office of Management and Budget, Treasury and the Education Department during his 25-year career in federal service, said there usually isn’t money to pay for these interest payments, so agencies will have make to cuts elsewhere.

“They may have to cut overtime or cut hiring to make room for these payments,” he said. “At Education, I ran both the financial and contracting side and budget and contracting work hand-in-hand in many cases. The budget has to be adjusted before an invoice is paid and it must draw from the same appropriation line. With the shutdown happening at the beginning of the fiscal year, agencies probably have money to pay the interest, but they will have less things to spend on during the year.”

Soltis said over the last decade through IPP or other electronic payment processing systems, the government has basically solved the issue of late payments to contractors, which is why Congress passed the Prompt Payment Act in 1982.

He said a lot of agencies may have to figure out how to calculate and pay the interest because it’s been so long since they’ve had to do it.

When is the invoice accepted?

Eric Crusius, a procurement attorney and partner with Hunton law firm, said he rarely hears from clients about prompt payment issues. But contractors need to be prepared to claim interest when the government reopens.

“If the invoice was submitted before the shutdown, then it’s supposed to be applied automatically,” he said. “I’d recommend first sending an email to the contracting officer about the interest that is due, and then lodge a claim with the contracting officer if they don’t accept it. Unless the contract has some other terms and conditions, usually there is a seven-day invoice acceptance period no matter if the government is open or not. Now, the government could make the argument that there wasn’t anyone there to receive the invoice or product or service. I’d recommend to make a claim and argue it should be automatically accepted.”

The issue of when the government “accepts” a company’s invoice is one of the biggest, and most concerning, questions that vendors need to understand.

Soltis said an agency accepting an invoice is usually dependent on how the contract is set up.

“There are specific terms in the contract for invoice acceptance and that is what would drive it. But in general, the contracting officer technical representative or contracting officer usually is the one that has to accept an invoice. And legally if the government doesn’t respond within seven days, it’s considered constructive receipt,” he said. “But a lot of times it’s later than that, and a lot of contractors don’t want to get a customer upset over when an invoice is officially accepted.”

Soltis said the issues become more complicated with products where there needs to be someone at a receiving dock or in the agency to accept the package, validate it and match it to the invoice.

In fact, Dell Technologies and its partner Carahsoft said in an email to a vendor supplier, which Federal News Network obtained, that the order placed by the supplier would be on hold until they receive confirmation that the agency customer will be on site to accept the delivery.

Vendors should document all expenses

Solstis said another challenge will be that agencies will face a backlog of invoices when they return to the office.

“Contractors who are holding their invoices could be sabotaging themselves. What people will tell you is to submit it and let the government sit on it. Then you can say you submitted it and the government delayed paying. But if you hold your invoices, then you can’t claim interest,” he said. “When the government reopens, I would have a meeting with all contractors and go through their issues to make sure we are on the same page. It’s a two-step process. First, what invoices need to be paid? Second, how do you get the contractors whole? Which ones need to get paid with interest? That will become a budget issue because you have to figure out where the money comes from, how to move it around and how to prioritize payments.”

The industry executive said they really don’t know when the clock starts for invoices on Sept. 30 or those submitted during the shutdown.

“If no one is there to accept the invoice, does it start when the government comes back?” the executive said. “Our success rate on getting prompt payment penalties is very small. The majority of the time the agency says they accepted invoice on specific date and that is when the clock starts. Sometimes, they will wait until day 28 or 30 and reject the invoice, which starts the clock over again. I feel like DoD takes advantage of rejecting it and forcing us to resubmit it, and then they have more time to accept it and then 30 days to pay it.”

Crusius said this is why it’s imperative for contractors to log their expenses and costs associated with their contracts during the entire shutdown.

“They can file claims when they need to, and with certain contracts there are ongoing expenses even if they have tried to pair them down. A lot of that will be dependent on whether they received a stop work order or had their contract scope reduced or received a termination for convenience,” he said. “Contractors have to be diligent in writing down their costs so they can try to collect them.”

The post Shutdown brings reemergence of prompt payment penalties first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Getty Images/iStockphoto/Morakot Kawinchan

Adrienne Chan‘s pivot away from a career in tech could more aptly be considered a pirouette.

The former Microsoft product manager is the co-founder of a new ballet school in Redmond, Wash., where she’s reconnecting with the dancing she practiced growing up, and seizing on a desire to run her own business.

“I knew I had to do this because I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Chan told GeekWire. “I loved my job at Microsoft, and I wanted to do both … but 24/7 my mind was only thinking about the ballet school.”

Bellevue Classical Ballet opened in September in Redmond Town Center with a mission to serve students of all ages and skill levels. Chan is serving as executive director, and her co-founder, Eric Hipolito Jr., a former dancer and instructor with Pacific Northwest Ballet School, is artistic director.

Chan first interned at Microsoft in 2017 before spending almost four years at the tech giant working on Azure products. She left in 2022 to get her Master of Science degree in entrepreneurship from the University of Washington before returning to Microsoft for another 11-month stint.

While at the UW, Chan utilized her engineering background and worked on a dance education app as part of her degree program.

“Something still felt a little off for me,” she admitted. “I felt that maybe I wanted to stray a little bit more away from tech.”

She met Hipolito and made the leap back into dancing. And along the way, she found tech was still a suitable partner.

Intrigued by entrepreneurship

Chan grew up in Toronto and transitioned from gymnastics to ballet as a kid, falling in love with the art form at age 9 thanks to her teachers. She eventually took up other styles of dance in productions within the Chinese community in Toronto.

She studied systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and as an undergrad, her first internship was at a startup incubator.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Chan said. “The drive that people have, the motivation — they just want to get work done. They’re so passionate. And that really sparked my interest in entrepreneurship.”

Her feelings were lining up with memories she had of a “career class” she took in high school where she had to list 10 things she might want to be when she grew up. Engineering was on the list. And so was CEO of a dance company.

Although she wanted to pursue her master’s directly after undergrad, she had already committed to Microsoft and moved to Seattle to begin her career.

Adaptability, iteration and more

Chan’s parents and others were a bit surprised when she left a high-paying tech job to go back to school, and even more so when she left that job again to open a ballet school.

Even though she was touching products used by millions of people, Chan wasn’t connecting with those people on a day-to-day basis. She wasn’t using those products herself, and they didn’t align with her aspirations.

“I really did enjoy my job at Microsoft, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted long term,” she said. “I wanted something more meaningful, something that felt like I could make an impact on people.”

Chan is a big believer in the notion that everything has led her to where she is today. And she feels that her tech background is making an impact on the ways she thinks about running a small business — something she’s been writing about in posts on LinkedIn.

“If I pursued dance in college, I don’t think I would be as successful doing this now,” she said. “I think that tech background really helped me do this.”

Managing a product is a lot like managing a business, Chan said, calling out the ambiguity of both. At the ballet school, she finds herself leaning on the adaptability and decisiveness that helped her at Microsoft, and iterating as she goes — a mindset she calls very common in tech.

But she’s not using AI.

When she had to crunch 100 different schedule options for the school, Hipolito asked why she didn’t just throw all the variables into an AI model and ask for the best result.

“I said, ‘No, I want to use my brain,'” Chan said. “I trust my brain.”

Chan also chuckles at the irony of her life now — teaching the kids of Microsoft workers while some of those parents are outside her dance studio working on laptops, doing code reviews or whatever else.

When people call her a risk-taker or commend her courage for the change she’s made, Chan doesn’t see it that way.

“It’s stressful. But I’m stressing for what I really want to be doing, what really matters to me,” she said. “I don’t think that’s replaceable at all. I don’t think there’s any other option.

When Marissa Coughlin left her latest tech job to open a romance bookstore and crafting hub in Seattle, she didn’t leave technology behind completely.

In fact, alongside her partner, Constantine Vetoshev, who still works in tech, artificial intelligence has become a major player in this next chapter of their lives.

Coughlin worked in a variety of communications and content roles for companies including Airbnb, Textio, Highspot, and most recently, T-Mobile. Vetoshev is a software developer at Brook.ai, a Seattle-area health technology startup that uses AI to help clinical teams deliver remote care.

Both big readers, the pair first started looking at spaces and developing a bookstore business plan in 2023. But with two small children, they were waiting for better timing. When a space became available on Market Street in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood they finally made the leap, and opened Swoon City last month.

While Coughlin has no interest in seeing AI used to write the books or illustrate the covers that line her shelves, she’s a big believer in how the technology can help the back end of the business.

“I think more businesses should be using this stuff, especially small businesses, if they can figure out how to tap into it,” Coughlin said. “It’s super useful, but you have to know that it’s there and what it can do, and be a little bit creative and figure out the solutions.”

Here are some of the ways Swoon City is tapping into AI, leveraging Coughlin and Vetoshev’s know-how:

• To help pick the store’s inventory of 3,000 books, they used analysis based on Seattle Public Library data of the most-borrowed romance novels over the past 18 months.
• They built a custom generative AI tool to categorize all the romance novels they bought into sub-genres so people can quickly find their favorites. For example, the book “Thirsty” would typically just be categorized under romance or maybe paranormal romance, but Swoon’s system categorizes it as paranormal romance, LGBTQ, enemies to lovers, vampire romance, romantic comedy, and urban fantasy.
• GenAI was used to build a customer loyalty program. Vetoshev, who said he is “all in” on Anthropic, asked the AI assistant Claude to analyze some requirements they had for different programs. Claude wrote back and said, “You could go with this one, or you could just build it yourself. Here’s how.”

“I feel like there’s a lot of things that we’ve created for this store that other people who might be curious about doing something like this could tap into and be able to leverage for their own stuff,” Coughlin said.

Vetoshev said he can come home from his day job, put the kids to bed and then focus on something that needs to be built for the store.

“A couple of hours of work with a [large language] model, and we’re off to the races,” he said.

The technology is all in service of a genre that is exploding, especially among young readers.

Romance is the leading growth category for the total print book market thus far in 2025, and the volume for the category has more than doubled compared to four years ago, with 51 million units sold in the past 12 months, according to industry analysis.

NPR credited romance interest driven by Gen Z readers, especially on BookTok, a subcommunity of TikTok for recommending, reviewing, and discussing books.

Swoon City is hoping to follow in the successful footsteps of The Ripped Bodice, an independent brick-and-mortar romance bookstore with locations in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, N.Y.

Coughlin looks forward to bringing people together not just around books, but by hosting various events and building out crafting classes for embroidery, stained glass, jewelry making and more.

“I feel like part of what was exciting for a romance bookstore is the community, because it is often not a genre that’s as well respected in the book community, even though it’s huge,” she said.

Arnis and Mallory Robbins thought they’d be slinging brisket with ease when they opened a new location of Evie Mae’s Pit Barbeque in Miramar Beach, Florida, last year. The couple is a decade into a successful run at the joint’s original location, in Wolfforth, just southwest of Lubbock, which has landed a top ten ranking in the last three of our Top 50 barbecue lists. They assumed the reputation they built in Texas would transfer elsewhere, and that barbecue lovers all over the Florida Panhandle would flock to Evie Mae’s once it opened. “Texas barbecue transcends Texas,” Arnis said. In a recent conversation at Evie Mae’s in Wolfforth, the couple shared some of the unexpected hurdles they’ve encountered and a stark realization about expanding to…

The post A Top Ten BBQ Joint Struggles to Find Its Footing in Florida appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Todd David has found that when professional pitmasters seek advice, it’s rarely about smoking meat. “No one asks about cooking barbecue,” he says of the conversations he’s been having through his new resource, Nextep Q. David launched the site to give back to the barbecue community that helped him build Cattleack Barbeque, in Farmers Branch, a suburb of Dallas, into a successful business. Think of it like a free hotline for barbecue joint owners in need of advice, with David always on the other end of the line.David opened Cattleack with his wife, Misty, in 2013 and sold it to longtime employee Andrew Castelan a decade later. The restaurant has been on our Top 50 barbecue joints list every time it has been eligible. What…

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