Dollar Year & Data Year

INTRODUCTION

Dollar Year. Data Year. Song of the Year. Year of the Tiger. Wonder Years. There are a lot of years to keep track of. This article will help you understand at least three of them.

REGIONS SCREEN

Data Year is the year of the dataset that you are utilizing. Currently, IMPLAN has datasets for 2001-2019 and two quarterly Data Years for 2020. We recommend using the Data Year that matches the year of your data which would be the year your Event took place. If you are modeling something that occurred this year or is expected to happen in the future, we recommend using the most current Data Year.

IMPACTS SCREEN

On the Impacts screen, there are two years with each Group. The Dollar Year should be the year of the data you are inputting and will default to the current year. The Data Year follows from the Regions screen and tells IMPLAN what dataset to use.

RESULTS SCREEN

On the Results screen, Dollar Year shows the year of the value of the economic indicators and is not tied to the Dollar Year from the Impacts screen. This will default to current year, but you can change it using the Filters. 

USING DIFFERENT DOLLAR YEARS

For an example of when Dollar Year on the Impacts screen will not be the year in which you event occurred, suppose you were borrowing a visitor expenditure pattern from a survey that was done in 2015.  But let’s say you want to use this data to estimate visitor spending in 2020. In this case, while the year of your event (that is, the year of the visits) is 2020, those dollars still represent 2015 dollars and must be characterized as such in order to generate correct results. By correctly telling IMPLAN that those values are 2015 values (by setting Dollar Year to 2015 on the Impacts screen), IMPLAN will know to inflate those values to the Data Year to ensure the correct values are applied to the multipliers.   

If you are setting up your event with an employment value instead of a dollar value (which we only recommend if you do not have a dollar value with which to start the set-up of your Event), Dollar Year on your Impacts screen should be set to the year in which that employment took place or is expected to take place.

Defining Dollar Year in the Impacts screen correctly is essential to getting accurate Results. On the other hand, how Dollar Year is defined in the Results screen is totally up to you and how you want to report your Results. If we want to report the effect of our 2020 visitors in 2020 dollars, we simply need to ensure the Dollar Year in the Results screen is filtered to 2020. 

YEAR OF THE TIGER

IMPLAN users born in 1926, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, and 2010 were born under the Year of the Tiger. Tigers are known to be very kind and imaginative. You can learn all about Tigers from the article Chinese New Year.

Updated April 7, 2021