Moving the Goalposts: SBA Proposes the Biggest Size-Standard Rewrite in Decades

Key Trends

• U.S. factory activity kept expanding but lost speed: the ISM Manufacturing PMI came in at 54.6% in August, down a full point from July’s 55.6% and the eighth straight month of growth, but new orders slowed to 53.7% from 56.7% and the ratio of positive-to-negative demand comments narrowed to 2-to-1 from 3.5-to-1.
• Private payroll data points the same direction: small businesses added 29,500 net new jobs in August, per Gusto, a seventh straight month of growth but the smallest gain of that streak, with Healthcare and Social Assistance leading at 16,300 net hires. The BLS Employment Situation for August, out Friday, will be the first official read on whether that slowdown holds economy-wide.
• AI use among small businesses keeps climbing but stays shallow: 76% of owners now report using AI, per Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses Voices survey, and 93% of users call the impact positive — but only 14% have fully integrated it into core operations, the same implementation gap owners have cited all year.

Notable Businesses & Launches

• Xero launched Xero Payroll, powered by Gusto, on August 12 — embedded payroll built directly into its US accounting platform, completing a stated “accounting, payments, payroll” strategy. The timing is pointed: Intuit’s QuickBooks Desktop 2023 loses payroll, bank-feed and security support after May 2026, pushing holdout users toward a platform decision.

  Unverified

  The claim that missed payrolls now affect roughly 3.4 million workers a year comes from Gusto’s own analysis, published alongside its own product launch — treat the figure as vendor-sourced framing rather than an independent count.

  Review

  The “3.4 million workers” figure in the callout above does not appear anywhere in the bullet it’s attached to — the bullet is about the Xero/Gusto payroll launch and QuickBooks Desktop’s support cutoff, neither of which states that number. Likely a leftover from an earlier draft where the stat was cut. Action: fix — either restore the sentence the flag was meant to cover, or remove the orphaned callout.

• Square rolled out an expanded Square Credit Card and Bill Pay on August 11: unlimited 3% cash back on Bill Pay transactions, 1.5% on everything else, and the ability to pay any vendor — even ones that don’t take cards — with Square routing the payment as ACH or check.

Funding & Investment

• Runable raised a $21 million Series A co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, for an AI-agent platform that builds, runs and markets a small business end-to-end — websites, ad campaigns, pitch decks — from one shared context.

  Review

  This Yahoo Finance link 404s — the correct slug includes “raises” (runable-raises-21m-series-help-120000916.html), not runable-21m-series-help-120000916.html. The underlying claim checks out against the corrected URL and matching TechCrunch coverage. Action: fix the link.

  Unverified

  Coverage traces to Runable’s own funding announcement, distributed via wire and republished without independent verification of the round’s terms.

Regulatory & Economic Context

• The SBA proposed the most consequential rewrite of small-business size standards in decades on August 20: receipts-based thresholds would be indexed to nominal GDP per employee instead of inflation alone, lifting the historical $1 million benchmark to $30.6 million versus $9.7 million under an inflation-only update. SBA estimates 114,541 net additional firms — including 37,002 existing federal contractors — would newly qualify as small. Comments are due September 21.

Takeaway