How to gather the data you need

To conduct an economic development analysis it is likely that you will need to have data on the number of employees, total revenue and the gross profits for each company.

Data on a company’s financial performance, including both revenues and gross profits should be available through their company accounts. Different countries have different reporting regimes for companies and often different reporting regimes for companies of different sizes. It is likely that most companies that governments are trading with will be able to provide a set of accounts.

If any of the data is not available, e.g. in the UK there is no requirement to provide data on the number of employees, then it will be necessary for bidders to provide this data as part of their tender submission. Some information, such as information about the nature of a job that is likely to be created will be linked to the individual contract and will therefore need to be part of the submission.

Where the same financial data is required by multiple agencies, but no central repository for this data exists, it may be desirable to collect data on suppliers in a central bidders database, so that suppliers can record and post required information once and multiple agencies can use this data when assessing bids.