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In the Census Bureau’s web site you can link to State & County QuickFacts, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/ which has business information at the national, state and county level. The State & County QuickFacts’ web site has facts about people, business, and geography.
Once you select State & County QuickFacts, a map gives you the option of selecting a State or “View more USA QuickFacts”:
For example, let’s take a look at the number of businesses in North Carolina by selecting the state. The Business QuickFacts are in the middle of the page:
To get more data for the businesses in North Carolina, we go to “Browse more data sets for North Carolina” at the top right of People QuickFacts:
Once we select “Browse more data sets for North Carolina” we get all the datasets available for businesses in the state. In this case, we select the “Minority- and women-owned business” table:
The table will open showing the statistics for North Carolina. If we want to narrow our search and find out the number of Hispanic businesses in Carteret County, NC we need to select the county and then click “Go”:
The table shows that there are a total 103 firms Hispanic-owned firms in Carteret County, NC and that 13 firms have paid employees:
For additional information about this survey, you can download a PDF file that contains a 190-page report about Hispanic businesses:
We can download the table into Excel. However, this action demands a few steps and some clean up. First, you need to save the Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses Carteret County, NC Table as an .html file. Then open Excel and after that, open the .html file. Initially, the Excel file will look a bit busy:
The clean up involves selecting “View” from the toolbar. After “View” opens, select “Toolbars” and next “Control Toolbox”. When a small window opens, select “Design Mode”:
While in the “Design Mode”, place the cursor by the areas you wish to delete, right click and cut all the boxes:
Once you are done deleting all the boxes, close the control toolbox and the design mode and remove the links by placing the cursor on top of the link, right click, select “Hyperlink” and then “Remove Hyperlink”. Next, highlight the areas to delete. Note that the links are gone (titles are in black) and the (1000) turned into –1000; so we’ll have to edit it:
Continue cleaning up the file until we get the format we wish to have:
The Business Section is another tool that has businesses statistics. This web site is at the Census web site home page:
Once there you will find information such as the latest economic indicators including Current Press Release (in Excel and PDF); Building Permits by State, Metropolitan Areas, County and Place Data and Annual Characteristics of New Housing for US and Regions:
This web site also breaks down economic statistics by geography (i.e., U.S., States, Metro areas, Counties, Places and Zip codes), Sector (according to NAICS) and Frequency (i.e., 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002 – depending on the survey). NAICS (pronounced Nakes) is a system for classifying business used by US statistical agencies. The NAICS web site includes 1,170 industries of which 565 are service-based industries. It also includes 358 new industries, 250 of which are services producing industries and 20 sectors, 16 of which are services related.
You can also view other statistics:
Once there, we choose Indiana: Next, we select “Dubois” and click “Submit”:
A table opens that has all the industries. To select “Construction” industry only, we “click” on “Detail” next to “Construction” and we get data from the 2-digit NAICS Sector to the 6-digit National NAICS.
A new page opens that shows that Dubois, IN has 53 establishments engaged in Single-family housing construction:
As we scroll down on the table, the establishments are organized by the number of employees. We note that most Single-family housing construction establishments in Dubois, IN have 1-4 employees and none have over 50 employees:
At the bottom of the table you can save this table as a Text file or as an Excel file (by choosing “Save as csv. File”) or you can “Change Geographic Area”:
Once we choose “Save as csv. File”, a window opens to give us the opportunity to “Save File” – we save it as “dubois single fam const.csv”.
Then when we open the table in Excel, the file contains all the items and we can edit it to fit our needs:
Note that as you scroll down you see the data for each Industry organized by the number of establishments by employment size. For example, we see that 39 single family housing construction companies have 1-4 employees.
Business Expenditures Survey (previously called Assets And Expenditures Survey) http://www.census.gov/csd/bes/ has national statistics on businesses’ operating expenses, such as payroll and fringe benefits, software and other computer expenses, office supplies, rental payments, advertising, accounting, and legal services. This data is available for selected retail, merchant wholesale, service, communication, trucking and warehousing, passenger transportation, manufacturing, mining and construction. In this web site you have several options like consulting the Company Statistics Series of the 1997 Economic Census or working with selected Excel Files.
The 178-page report of the Company Statistics Series of the 1997 Economic Census report has collective data on the operating expenses of business and organizations across most sectors (i.e., NAICS) of the U.S.:
We can also select an Excel file, like “Merchant Wholesale”:
Which will generate the spreadsheet for operating expenses for merchant wholesale:
Help with statistics is available via telephone, e-mail, or mail:
Help regarding starting or expanding your business is available at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) http://www.sba.gov/. You can also contact the SBA Answer Desk at 1-800-8-ASK-SBA (1- 800-827-5722) |
