Monthly

Data collection is by post and via the internet over a period that extends from the end of the month preceding the survey month to the survey publication date, i.e. 4 business days before the end of the current month.
Survey results are sent to the European Commission 4 business days before the end of the month.

The collection period runs from the end of the month preceding the reference month of the survey to the date of publication of the results (between the 20th and 25th of the reference month).

Survey of a sample of 4,500 enterprises in services and road haulage of goods.
All road haulage companies having annual turnover in excess of €30 million are surveyed systematically.
For other service enterprises, this threshold is €45 million.

4,500 units

The survey is conducted every month but not all questions are asked every month. Some questions are only asked to enterprises in road haulage of goods.
The survey questionnaires consists of a common core of monthly questions to which are added, depending on the month, some quarterly, biannual or annual questions.
- Since the October 2020 campaign, the survey in services has included a set of quarterly questions on the effects of the sanitary crisis.
- Since the April 2021 campaign, a question has been introduced within the framework of the joint harmonised EU programme of business and consumer surveys (BCS). The business managers are asked to indicate how easy it is to predict the future development of their business situation.
- From the October 2021 campaign, new questions on investment issues are asked. Most of these questions are part of the harmonised EU programme. They are qualitative, and no longer quantitative, with a quarterly, biannual or annual frequency depending on the item. In parallel, some questions related to the company's financial conditions and to the payment periods have been removed in order to limit the response burden for this survey.

The published series are seasonally adjusted (CVS). Seasonality tests are carried out on all series. As a result, the published series are seasonally adjusted (CVS). A series that initially has no seasonal character is presented as a CVS series with zero coefficients and is equal to the gross series. The effects are estimated with the X13 and TramoSeats software under JDemetra+ (provided by Eurostat) at the level of aggregates specific to the NAF rev. 2 subclass survey. CVS indices for senior positions are obtained directly, not by aggregating the CVS indices that compose them.