The sales inquiry
Description of the data collection
The sales inquiry concerning manufacturing and services asks for monthly sales data corresponding to turnover data as defined in the Accounting Act broken down between domestic sales and sales abroad. The sales inquiry is carried out monthly.
The sales inquiry concerning construction inquires about monthly level sales data on main contract type of activity and sub-contracting in Finland, sales of construction services abroad and own use of construction services.
The Council Regulation (EC) No 2019/2152 and No 2020/1197 concerning short-term statistics obliges Statistics Finland to produce statistics describing short-term economic cycles on the volumes of industrial output and the sum of wages and salaries, for example.
From whom are data collected?
The sales inquiry covers around 2,000 most important enterprises in their respective industries from whom data on turnover are collected monthly. The inclusion criterion for the sample is the size of the enterprise’s turnover relative to the turnover of the respective industry. In addition, data on the wages and salaries sum are inquired from around 30 enterprises divided into kind-of-activity units, because they are not available from other sources.
The sample of the inquiry is updated monthly due to enterprise reorganisations. A larger sample updating is carried out yearly.
Enterprises' obligation to provide data is based on the Statistics Act (280/2004).
What are the data used for?
The data from the sales inquiry are used for producing data on economic cycles in the Index of Turnover in Industry, Index of Turnover of Construction, Turnover of Trade, Turnover of Service Industries and Wage and Salary Indices. In addition, the data are used for producing statistics on the tailored trend indicator service.
Data processing
The Statistics Act obliges Statistics Finland to treat the data as confidential and use them only for statistical purposes. The data are reported as industry-specific index figures in the statistics published.
How often are data collected?
Monthly