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QUARTERLY FINANCIAL REPORT

PURPOSE

To provide up-to-date aggregate statistics on the financial results and position of U.S. corporations. Title 13 of the United States Code requires this survey and provides for mandatory responses. Data has been collected quarterly since 1947. The program was transferred to the Census Bureau from the Federal Trade Commission in 1982.

COVERAGE

Corporations that have a plurality of business activity in manufacturing industries and domestic assets over $250,000; and corporations with a plurality of business activity in the mining, retail, or wholesale trade industries and domestic assets over $50 million. These include almost 164,000 corporations with estimated assets of over $6.1 trillion.

CONTENT

Corporations provide standard income statement and balance sheet data consolidated for all majority-owned domestic enterprises (except banking, insurance, and finance). Information collected includes sales, depreciation, before- and after-tax income, retained earnings, cash, investments, receivables, inventories, fixed assets, short- and long-term debt, accounts payable, and stockholders' equity.

Large corporations report additional data that include separate reporting of non-operating income and expenses, earnings from foreign and other non-consolidated entities and investments, extraordinary gains and losses, trade receivables from the U.S. Government, investments in Federal and other securities, commercial paper issued, and treasury stock.

FREQUENCY

Data collection begins about 25 days after each quarter and continues for about 9 weeks; data are for 3 months of company activities. The survey panel is updated quarterly.

METHODS

Mail-out/mail-back surveys of some 3,700 large manufacturing, mining, and trade corporations using a long form, and of some 4,900 selected small- and medium-sized manufacturers using a short form; plus periodic reporting by corporations to determine and update business classification. The sample frame of firms is updated annually from Federal income tax records. Using the tax data, corporations are selected by stratified random sample, with strata by industry and asset size. Data for manufacturing firms with assets between $250,000 and $250 million are estimated from a sample panel. Each quarter, one-eighth of the sample panel is replaced. Replacement firms report for 8 quarters.

PRODUCTS

Quarterly Financial Report for Manufacturing, Mining, and Trade Corporations publications are released 75 days after each of the first three quarters, and 95 days after the fourth quarter. The report provides 5 quarters of data, including estimated statements of income and retained earnings, balance sheets, and related financial and operating ratios by industry and asset size. Revisions to data for prior quarters are made when necessary and usually result from respondent data corrections subsequent to publication. Information is provided, when possible, on material distortions in comparability due to changes in accounting conventions or users' needs.

USES

The Bureau of Economic Analysis uses the data as a primary source for current estimates of corporate profits, taxes, and dividends in quarterly estimates of Gross Domestic Product and national income and in a cyclical economic indicator series. The Federal Reserve uses the data as a major building block in estimating the U.S. flow of funds and its sole source of consolidated data for non-financial corporations. The Small Business Administration uses the data to trace the financial performance of small business, analyze and prepare reports for use in loan policy-making, and advise the Administration and Congress on small versus large company performance. The data are widely used by domestic and foreign businesses, financial analysts, researchers, trade associations, and banking institutions.