Major categories of exempt sales are food not prepared for immediate consumption, medical and legal services, residential utilities, items purchased for resale, intangible personal property, and rentals over six months. Taxable sales are reported directly on the return and these data are entered into the Department's computer system, a process which consumes several weeks. Thus, as an example, data on taxable sales transactions which took place in January would be sent in on the return due in February, and available as data toward the latter part of March. The data in these tables are dated according to the month of transaction. After the initial release of the data by the Department of Revenue, it undergoes an audit process to check for errors.
Error checking involves making sure the data from the return is internally consistent.
This process usually takes six to eight weeks, when the revised data is released. A notation indicating whether the data is preliminary or revised is at the bottom of the monthly tables. Even after going through the audit process, data for small MSAs can be quite volatile from month to month, with a high degree of seasonality as well as what appears to be random noise. Users are cautioned against making inferences based on less than three or four months of data, even when allowing for seasonality. When a business applies for a sales tax license, it is classified according to its main type of business.