We estimate turnover and employees for companies where we have enough data. We calculate growth rates to provide these estimates.
Intro
Our data on company employee counts and company turnovers is provided by CreditSafe and is based on financial reportings to Companies House. We get data, per company, per year.
There is often no data or missing data for all or some years. Employee count data is more common than turnover data. Since there is a lag in financial reporting, we always use estimated employees and estimated turnover for the current year's values (this also helps to address missing data). Where we cannot estimate these values, we do not report them.
We have developed our own methods for estimating company growth rates even when only limited data is available, for example, where employee counts are reported infrequently or have not been reported recently.
We use our company growth rates to estimate employees and to estimate turnover.
You will see our best estimates for current turnover and employee count in the company summaries for roughly half of all businesses. Those businesses without an estimate are very likely to have zero employees. You can expect these estimates to change monthly as these estimates update as we receive more data.
Growth in our UI
The Growth tab shows our estimates of company employees and turnover by year: best estimate employee growth percentage per year and best estimate turnover growth percentage per year.
The best way for you to get a feel for our estimation algorithm is to look at the graphs in this growth tab for a few companies that you know well.
If a company has reported employee count for three years or more we fit an exponential curve to those years and use this to calculate an annual employee growth rate. We do the same for turnover.
Growth rate does not refer to year on year growth, but rather the average growth rate from the curve we fit. A year on year growth rate would not be able to handle missing data as well.
If a company has both an annual employee growth rate and an annual turnover growth rate from these methods we take the average and report this as the best estimated annual growth rate. If only one method gives a result we use that figure.
Where a company has never reported employee count we assume zero employees.
Where a company has never reported turnover we assume zero turnover.
Where a company has reported employee count for only one or two years we estimate an employee count that starts in the first year an employee count is reported and continues at the level of the most recent year up to 2024 (the final year of our projections).
Note: Companies much more frequently report employee count than turnover. In the case of a company reporting only employee counts we estimate turnover based on the average turnover per employee for that company’s SIC codes.
Caveats
- We constrain projections for sensible results.
- When using EXPLORE you have the option of using either the turnover growth rate, employee growth rate, or a combined growth rate. ANALYSE exclusively uses employee growth rate, to account for inflation.
- The method here works very well for the vast majority of companies. But some companies do very strange things with their annual accounts and these edge case can affect aggregate results especially when those companies are very large. You can read more about how we're addressing this here.