The value of transactional data to a consumer spending survey

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) regularly explores ways to integrate alternative data sources and evaluate the fitness for use of these data for BLS data collection programs. In this article, we evaluate transactional data in the context of how it could be used to complement the Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE). We first discuss the differences between transactional data and survey data and describe the challenges in developing a concordance to compare trends. Next, we compare spending changes in high-level industries by using the two matched sources over the period of January 2019 to December 2021. We find that in some industries the data sources show very similar trends (like food, accommodation, and entertainment), but data sources have a lower correlation in trends for other industries (like information and telecommunication).