Reports - Business Summary vs Business Locator
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12-03-2014 02:33 PM
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The provided reports in Business Analyst Online (BAO) and Business Analyst desktop have a Business Summary and a Business Locator report. Both reports are meaningful and helpful, however, they hurt our credibility when sharing with our clients who instantly think our data is flawed and not trustworthy because the Total Businesses (Total Numbert of Businesses) and Total Employees (daytime population) are different between the reports. I put in a tech support ticket and it was explained to me that the Business Summary is an estimate just like Population and other demographics that are allocated from block groups which are from the block points. The Business Locator report is the actual number of businesses within that geography, it is calculated from a point layer. So, one they assign those points to a block group and then it gets calculated from that and the other is the actual physical points that are there. I'm not arguing that one is better than the other, I just want them to be consistent and pick one for their reports. This is very hard to explain to users and clients that want to use both of these reports. Either being more specific on the reports with the source line or variable naming, or making these reports grab that same figure, would be a big improvement, I think. Please contact me if you want me to explain this better or show more examples. Thanks! 
1 Comment
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DonnaBuhr
Hi Buck,
Thank you for your valuable feedback. Based on your suggestion, a Data Note is added to both reports explaining how the data is calculated.
Business Locator Data Note:
Business Summary Data Note:
This was a very good idea that will help many users better understand how the data is calculated.
Thank you for using Business Analyst.
Best regards,
Donna