One way to gauge the health of small businesses is through statistics gathered by payroll companies.
Automatic Data Processing Inc. provides a monthly look at hiring using data from a sample of 337,000 businesses to which it provides payroll services. The ADP National Employment report gets a lot of attention because it’s released two days before the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ official reading on those employed and unemployed.
Last Wednesday, the ADP National Employment report indicated that employment increased 110,000 from September to October. On Friday, the government report showed a little less, with 80,000 jobs created.
Beyond what everyone calls the “headline” number, the 38-page BLS report contains statistics about who make up the ranks of the unemployed and which industry sectors had job gains or losses. It’s the source for numbers such as the average hourly earnings for all employees, which increased by a nickel to $23.19 per hour in October.
The ADP report breaks down its data by business size: small (those with up to 49 workers), medium (50-499) and large (500 or more). Small businesses created 58,000 jobs in October, down from 64,000 the previous month. Payrolls at medium-size businesses rose by 53,000, but contracted at large employers by 1,000.
Another company that focuses exclusively on small businesses using payroll data to provide a snapshot of their financial condition is SurePayroll, a Glenview, Ill., unit of Paychex Inc.
It produces a monthly “scorecard” on hiring and paycheck levels, drawing on the 33,000 small-business customers who use SurePayroll’s online payroll-processing services. For October, the company found hiring and paychecks were down from the previous month. Hiring nationwide is down 2.9 percent year-to-date, while paychecks are lighter by 0.6 percent.
SurePayroll also provides the same two stats for 35 metropolitan statistical areas. For Philadelphia, it’s a good news, bad news scenario. Hiring is down 5.5 percent year-to-date, but the size of our paychecks has grown 6.5 percent.
A SurePayroll spokeswoman said the intent of the data is not to compare metro areas against one another, but to provide trends within individual markets.
Still, who can help noticing that the increase in paycheck size at Philadelphia small businesses was second only to St. Louis, where paychecks were up 8.6 percent so far in 2011?
I found that surprising, given that Philadelphia and St. Louis don’t get as many props as entrepreneurial hotbeds as the more celebrated cities of San Francisco, Boston, and New York do.
SurePayroll data show paychecks in Boston were up 4.8 percent, down 3.1 percent in New York, and up just 0.4 percent in San Francisco. Good thing those aren’t high-cost areas to live in, right?
Earnings
Monday: RCM Technologies; Tuesday: Amerigas Partners, CardioNet, Institutional Financial Markets, South Jersey Industries, UGI; Wednesday: BioClinica, EnerSys, StoneMor Partners; Thursday: Discovery Laboratories.
Contact Mike Armstrong
at 215-854-2980, marmstrong@phillynews.com, or @PhillyInc on Twitter. Read his blog, “PhillyInc,” at www.phillyinc.biz
Article source: http://www.philly.com/philly/business/columnists/133337938.html
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