Quarterly Services Indicators

Detailed information for first quarter 2006

The Quarterly Services Indicators (QSI) provide quarterly movements of operating revenues for selected industries in business and consumer services in order to track their quarterly economic performance.

• Questionnaire(s) and reporting guide(s)
• Description
• Data sources and methodology

Description

The Quarterly Services Indicators (QSI) track the sub-annual economic performance for industries in business and consumer services, ranging from hotels and accountants to personal care services. The statistical tables include the quarterly movements of operating revenues for selected 4-digit NAICS industries.

As there are few sub-annual output measures for the services industries, the QSI will fill this gap for policy makers requiring more timely information to better assess current economic conditions.

Collection period: During the month following the reference quarter

Subjects

• Business, consumer and property services
• Business performance and ownership
• Financial statements and performance

Data sources and methodology

Instrument design

The indices incorporate both administrative and survey data. For simple establishments, levels of operating revenues reported to Canada Revenue Agency for the purposes of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) are used. A questionnaire gathers information from complex establishments, and is collected at the enterprise level.

The Quarterly Services Indicators Survey questionnaire was designed to collect quarterly operating revenue data from complex enterprises. Given the broad range of industries being surveyed, the questionnaire had to be of a sufficiently generic design to adequately capture the required data and yet specifically exclude data that were deemed outside the scope of interest.

The questionnaire is designed to allow the respondent to report revenues for all thirteen provincial and territorial jurisdictions.

Questionnaire testing was performed by Statistics Canada's Questionnaire Design Resource Center in 2005. A series of one-on-one interviews was conducted with firms in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal.

Sampling

Data are collected for all units of the target population, therefore there is no sampling. The survey portion of the QIRI is a census of complex units.

Data sources

Data are extracted from administrative files.

For simple enterprises, levels of operating revenues reported to Canada Revenue Agency for the purposes of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) are used. A simple establishment is defined as a firm that undertakes only one business activity at the 4-digit NAICS level and operates in only one province. A survey component gathers information from complex enterprises. Complex enterprises are defined as those that operate in more than one provincial jurisdiction and/or have some economic activity in more than one industry designation.

Administrative data

The GST file is sent by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to Tax Data Division (TDD) at Statistics Canada. TDD then carries out further processing which is solely for statistical purposes at Statistics Canada. The TDD processing is not intended to administer or monitor the GST program and no edits or modifications are ever sent back to CRA.

This processing ensures a clean and complete database to be accessed by the various business survey programs at Statistics Canada. TDD processing includes outlier detection, correction of erroneous data, and replacement of missing data through edit, imputation and extrapolation.

TDD also breaks multi-weekly, quarterly or annual transactions into monthly data, through a calendarization process. In this process sales figures are distributed over the calendar months covered by non-monthly transactions using a calculated industry specific seasonal pattern. Finally, monthly data are allocated to their corresponding enterprise(s) and establishment(s) using information from Statistics Canada's Business Register. The allocation process splits enterprises into two types of units, simple and complex.

The Quarterly Industry Revenue Indices program utilizes the allocated file for the simple units provided by TDD, to generate quarterly revenue figures for the universe of simple units covered by the program.

Survey data

The survey portion of QIRI is a census and is mandatory. The survey uses e-questionnaire, fax and mail as modes of collection. The survey is establishment based and is based exclusively on the Business Register from which the survey universe is drawn once a year. Data are collected at the enterprise level. The data are collected, edited and compiled within a 45-day period of the end of the calendar quarter. The TDD allocated file for complex units is used as an auxiliary file in the process of imputing values for the nonresponding complex units.

View the Questionnaire(s) and reporting guide(s) .