How does benchmarking work and where does the comparison data come from?

Benchmarking is a process where you measure your company's success against similar companies to assess the performance gap that can be closed by improving your performance. Studying other companies can illuminate what you need to focus on to enhance your company’s efficiency and profitability to become more competitive.

The data that powers benchmarking in Business Lift+ comes from the tax return data of over 30 million+ anonymized businesses in the United States. Your firmographic information is used to help compare the tax data of your business so that the metrics you see represent benchmarks to similar businesses.

Firmographic data is information that can be used to categorize organizations, such as geographic area, number of customers, type of organization (by NAICS code), industry, number of employees, and so on.

Designations such as public or private corporations, non-profits or charitable organizations, are important and relevant data.  Data such as name, address, or CEO are not part of the firmographic description of a company.  

Benchmarking data is based on the most recently available business tax returns from the IRS.