Riverside Payments Inc., its equipment-leasing affiliate Cascade Equipment Leasing LLC and their operators will pay $600,000 to settle FTC and Washington state allegations that they promised small businesses 40% to 60% savings on card processing while hiding fees, auto-renewing three-year contracts and a $695 early termination fee. The proposed order, announced Nov. 2, 2026 and filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, suspends a $32,083,921 judgment and requires the companies to tell customers they can rescind processing agreements without a termination fee or penalty for 60 days.

Take a 16-person HVAC shop running $90,000 a month in card payments at an assumed 2.9% effective rate, or $2,610 a month. A 40% savings pitch promises $1,044 a month back. The complaint says switchers typically ended up paying more once fees missing from the quote sheet appeared: activation, batch, data-security non-compliance and inactive-processing fees. Getting out meant a $695 exit fee buried in a 26-page contract, plus a Cascade terminal lease that auto-renews and runs one year past the three-year processing term. Cancel calls often went unanswered. Riverside and Cascade customers should care most: the 60-day window removes the $695 fee. The release does not say whether the terminal lease ends too, so ask in writing. Everyone else should treat this as a checklist. If your processor contract has a multi-year term, auto-renewal, an exit fee or a separate equipment lease, you face the same risks. Shops on month-to-month, flat-rate processing with no lease can skim and move on.

The Social Security Administration set the 2027 taxable maximum at $192,300, up from $184,500 in 2026, in its Oct. 14, 2026 announcement. The 6.2% Social Security tax applies to the first $192,300 of each worker's pay, for both the employer and the employee, and the 3.6% cost-of-living increase for benefits starts in January.

The change only touches pay above $184,500. Take a 25-person electrical contractor with an owner on a $240,000 W-2 salary and one estimator at $120,000. The estimator is under the cap and sees no change. The owner's Social Security tax goes from $11,439 to $11,922.60, which is $483.60 more for the company and $483.60 more from the owner's pay. Total: $967.20 a year. If nobody on your payroll earns over $184,500, nothing changes for you. If your software has the 2026 cap hard-coded, it will stop withholding at the old number and you will under-withhold in the fall of 2027. Medicare has no cap and is not part of this change.

The Small Business Administration proposed new size standards for 338 industry groups on Aug. 20, 2026 (Docket SBA-2026-0199, RIN 3245-AI67). On Sept. 24 it extended the comment deadline by 60 days, to Nov. 20, 2026.

The proposal sets limits at the 4- and 5-digit NAICS level instead of the 6-digit code, and uses an employee count rather than annual receipts wherever SBA has the choice. A rule written this way can move a firm in or out of small status without any change to the firm itself. SBA's own estimate: 5,314 engineering firms (NAICS 541330) with current federal contracts would newly qualify for set-asides. SBA also says the effect on SBA 7(a) and 504 lending is minimal. Say you run a 30-person engineering or consulting practice. Small status matters if you bid on federal set-aside work, use an SBA-backed loan or want to qualify as a subcontractor to a prime that has small-business goals. If you do none of those, the effect on you is small, and you can ignore this. This is a proposal, not a final rule, so nothing changes yet.

OpenAI told users by email that it will merge the Chat and Work tabs in ChatGPT, starting with select users for feedback before a wide rollout, while Codex stays a separate experience in the desktop app. With the change, ChatGPT and Codex will draw tokens from the same allowance pool, which OpenAI said won't affect most users but may mean some wait for resets more often, depending on usage and model.

Primary source not confirmed: this is based on an OpenAI email as reported by TechCrunch, and the email itself was not available. The tab merge is mostly a layout change. The part that matters is the shared pool. Take a 14-person marketing agency with 6 ChatGPT seats. Assume 2 of those staff also use Codex to build client landing pages. Today their chat work and their Codex work count against separate limits. After the change, one heavy Codex afternoon could leave that person waiting for a reset when they need ChatGPT for a client deck. If each of those 2 people loses 30 minutes twice a month, that is about 2 hours a month, or roughly $100 at $50 an hour. No price change has been announced. Shops where nobody uses Codex, which covers most trades businesses and many accounting and law practices, can ignore this. Agencies and firms with someone writing code in Codex should watch for limit messages once the rollout reaches them.