Editorial & Corrections Policy

PlainBizBench turns public IRS, Census, and SBA datasets into plain-language industry financial benchmarks. This page explains how those pages are produced, the standards we hold them to, and exactly how to flag a number that looks wrong.

How Pages Are Produced

PlainBizBench is a data-publishing project, not a hand-written magazine. Our industry, sector, state, and ranking pages are generated from a documented pipeline: we download published datasets directly from their source agencies, load them into a structured database, compute benchmark metrics, and render each page from that database. The figures you see, profit margins, payroll per employee, revenue per employee, employment and establishment counts, are computed from the agencies' own published numbers, not hand-typed and not estimated by us.

The same template renders hundreds of industry and geographic pages so that coverage is consistent across every NAICS code we cover. We are transparent that these data pages are produced programmatically from the source datasets rather than authored one at a time. The editorial work goes into the pipeline (how data is sourced, matched across datasets, and computed), the methodology, and the written guides, not into hand-checking every one of the millions of underlying figures, which a small team cannot honestly claim to do.

Sourcing Standards

  • Primary sources only. Financial figures come from the IRS Statistics of Income (SOI) Business Tax Statistics. Employment, establishment, and payroll figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023 release. Small-business lending figures, where shown, come from SBA 7(a) and 504 loan data released under the Freedom of Information Act.
  • Attribution in context. Each data page names its source dataset and reference year near the figures, and links to the methodology that explains how the metric was built.
  • Derived values are labeled. Numbers we compute ourselves, profit margins, per-employee ratios, percentile rankings, are presented as our calculation from the agencies' published data, distinct from the raw figures those agencies publish.
  • No invented data. Where the IRS suppresses a figure for privacy or a value is unavailable for an industry, the page says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate. We do not blend the two datasets where their NAICS structures do not align.

Update Cadence

The Census Bureau publishes County Business Patterns once a year, typically 12–18 months after the reference year. IRS Statistics of Income data lags two to three years because of the time needed to process and aggregate tax returns. We refresh our database when each new vintage is released from either source and recompute the derived metrics and rankings. Because the two sources are on different release cycles, the most recent available year can differ between them, so we show the reference year on every data page rather than implying the figures are live.

Corrections Process

If a figure on PlainBizBench looks wrong, please tell us. Because our pages are generated from the source datasets, a genuine error almost always traces back to either the upstream data or our processing of it, so this is how we handle a report:

  1. Report. Email us through the contact page, or write to corrections@plainbizbench.com, with the page URL and the number that looks off.
  2. Verify. We compare the figure against the IRS SOI, Census CBP, or SBA source for that industry and reference year.
  3. Fix at the source. If the value is wrong on our side, we correct it in the database and pipeline that generate the page, not just on the single page, so every affected page is fixed at once. If the figure faithfully reflects the agency's published data, we explain that and, where useful, add context.
  4. Note it. Material corrections that change a published figure or explanation are reflected when the corrected page rebuilds, with the data reference year shown so you can see which release a page is based on. We add a dated entry to our data & editorial changes record at that time.

We verify reports against the applicable source before changing a published page. We do not promise a fixed response or release time because a report may depend on the source agency's published vintage, but accepted material corrections are recorded publicly when they are deployed.

What Our Editorial Team Is, and Is Not, Accountable For

Our editorial team is accountable for the things a small team can genuinely stand behind: the integrity of the pipeline, the accuracy of the methodology, the plain-language framing of the guides, and fixing errors promptly when they are reported. We are not claiming to hand-review every one of the millions of underlying figures before publication, that would not be true, and a false trust signal is worse than none. Instead, we make the source and reference year visible on every page so any figure can be checked against the original agency release.

Editorial Independence

PlainBizBench is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with the IRS, the Census Bureau, the Small Business Administration, or any government agency. Our guides and rankings are not influenced by advertisers; advertising, where present, is clearly distinguishable from editorial content and never determines which industries or rankings we show. Rankings are computed mechanically from the source figures, so no business or industry can pay to move up a list.

Appropriate Use

PlainBizBench is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, tax, accounting, or business advice. Industry benchmarks are aggregates across every business in a NAICS category, and an individual business can differ sharply from the average depending on its size, geography, and market. For decisions about pricing, compensation, lending, or growth, consult a qualified accountant or financial advisor. See our disclaimer for the full appropriate-use notice.