Data Sources Explained

Two Sources, One Complete Picture

PlainBizBench draws from two distinct government datasets that complement each other. The IRS Statistics of Income (SOI) provides financial data, revenue, expenses, profit margins, from aggregated tax returns. The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) provides operational data, employment counts, establishment counts, and payroll. Together, they create a comprehensive industry profile that neither source provides alone.

Understanding what each source measures, and what it cannot measure, is essential for interpreting the benchmarks on PlainBizBench accurately. This page explains both sources in detail.

IRS Statistics of Income (SOI)

The SOI division of the IRS publishes aggregated financial data from US business tax returns, organized by NAICS industry code. This is the source of all profit margin, revenue, and expense data on PlainBizBench. The data covers C Corporations, S Corporations, Partnerships, and Sole Proprietorships, every business entity that files a federal tax return.

SOI data is uniquely valuable because it represents the complete universe of businesses that file taxes, not a sample or survey. When PlainBizBench shows a profit margin for an industry, it is calculated from the actual reported financials of every business in that NAICS code, not an estimate from a subset. However, SOI data lags 2-3 years because tax returns take time to process and aggregate.

Official source: IRS SOI Business Tax Statistics

Census Bureau County Business Patterns (CBP)

CBP provides annual employment, establishment counts, and payroll data for businesses with paid employees, organized by NAICS code at the national, state, and county level. This is the source of all employment, establishment count, and payroll-per-employee data on PlainBizBench.

CBP data comes from the Census Bureau's Business Register, which compiles information from tax returns, surveys, and other administrative records. Unlike SOI, CBP excludes sole proprietors without employees and government agencies. CBP data is released approximately 12-18 months after the reference year, faster than SOI. It is subject to noise suppression for privacy in small cells (few establishments in a specific geography/industry combination).

Official source: Census Bureau County Business Patterns

How We Combine Them

PlainBizBench joins IRS SOI financial data with Census CBP employment and payroll data using NAICS codes as the common key. Financial metrics (profit margins, revenue, entity type breakdowns) come from SOI. Operational metrics (employment, establishments, payroll per employee) come from CBP. Each metric on PlainBizBench is clearly sourced to one dataset or the other.

We do not blend or interpolate between the two sources. If SOI reports a profit margin and CBP reports employment for the same NAICS code, both appear on the industry page. If one source lacks data for a specific NAICS code (typically because of aggregation or suppression), we show what is available rather than estimating the gap.