I need to analyze the impact for 5 years.

Hi Jeff. IMPLAN is a model designed to perform annual economic impacts. However, if you have collected data for multiple years in the same study region/county, then you can develop one model and create 5 different activities and events. In this case, each year would be a separate activity and event in the model. For each of your event values, you should set the event year (by “Event Options>Edit Event Properties>Event Year) prior to entering the data for a given year. For example, if you have data for 2006 through 2011, then you would want to change the event year for event #1 (2006) to 2006, event #2 to 2007, and so forth. You would do this for each year of your collected data. We would also suggest that you properly label each scenario according to the year of the event that is included in it. When you finish creating all activities, events, and individual scenarios for your data (so that you can report each year discreetly), you can select all five activities into a single scenario to model your analysis. When finished, you can view your results by navigating to “Scenario Results” and “Select the Scenario” from the upper left corner of the software. You should see six scenarios (for this example) in this dropdown menu, one for each year of your data. Select a specific scenario. Next, right below the “Select the Scenario” window you will see a “Dollar Year of View” window. Click in that cell and a dropdown menu will appear, allowing you to select a year in which you want to view your impact results. If you selected Scenario #1 (2006) from above, you would select 2006 from the “Dollar Year of View” window. This will show the value of those impacts in 2006 dollars. To view 2007 impact results, you would navigate to the “Select the Scenario” and click on Scenario #2 (2007). Next, you would navigate to the “Dollar Year of View” window and select the year 2007 to view these results. You would do this for each scenario in the model. If you want to model the impact of your data over the entire time period (2006 – 2011), then you would create a seventh scenario and select all six previously created activities. Now you can create tables and report the impact results for each year of your data and the impacts during the six-year period. Finally, if you have the data, you can model as many years of economic impact as you want using the process describe here. You can purchase past years of the data for your state by contacting IMPLAN's Sales Support Team. We hope that this answers your question. Please let us know if we can be of further help.

Thank you so much! It worked very well. Thank you for your clear step by step instructions. I am working on a complex to be built. The clients have given us data for 5 years but wants to analyze it for 20 years as well. So I have to set up a new activity for the 15 more years after the first 5 years? I also want to pull out the effect of visitors to the complex and I have data on how many out of town and how many will be day visitors and what they may spend. How do I go about getting the effect of visitors isolated. Thanks,

Hi Jeff. This should be fairly easy to do. But to do so, could you please tell us a little more about how your visitors are identified? For example, how many are out-of-town visitors and how many are local visitors? How many of the out-of-town visitors are day-visitors (one day only) and how many are multiple-day visitors (and if so, how many days did they attend the event)? Finally, is the spending profile that you have the same for all visitors (day visitors, multiple-day visitors, and local visitors) to the facility? This help us in guiding you on how to set up the model. Thanks!

So, this is a complex that is going support to multiple sporting events. They are expecting about 18,597 local players to attend (combined all sports) and 18,249 out of town of which 60% will not be overnight and 40% will spend the night. There will spend on average 2 days and one family member will accompany each player. Do you need the estimates for food and expenses per day or does Implan calculate that? Thanks for the prompt reply!

Hi Jeff. In addition to the number of visitors, you would also need the visitor spending as well. IMPLAN has no way of determining how much and on what local and out-of-town visitors spend at various tourism and sporting events. It is necessary to align, or “bridge”, your spending categories with IMPLAN sectors to properly run the analysis. If you don't have a spending pattern for day-visitors and overnight visitors, you may be able to use a similar activity in another community in your region. If you have this, you can create separate activities for local and overnight/non-local visitors and bridge their spending to the IMPLAN sectors. The following table provides a rough example of how you might want the data set up. Measure Day visitors Overnight visitors IMPLAN Sectors Visits Spending (per visitor) Lodging/motels Restaurants Food and beverages Gasoline Souvenirs and other retail Other (please specify) Other (please specify) Other (please specify) For the day-visitors activity, you would create an event for each of the spending categories related to these visitors and enter the spending amount for each category. For each of your event values (if necessary), you should set the event year (by “Event Options>Edit Event Properties>Event Year) prior to entering the data for a given year. When finished, you would do the same for the overnight/nonlocal visitors associated with the event. When you get ready to run your analysis, you would create a scenario for the day visitors, set the Scenario Level” to the number of day visitors associated with the tourism/sporting event and name it. Select the scenario and “Select the activity from the Available Activities” and move over to “Select Activity“ to analyze the scenario. Next, you would do the same for the overnight/non-local visitors. Create a scenario for the overnight visitors, set the Scenario Level” to the number of overnight visitors associated with the tourism/sporting event, name it, Select the activity from the Available Activities” and move over to “Select Activity“, and analyze the scenario. Although you probably don’t want to count the economic impact of local tourists, you may want to count the retail sales taxes that these visitors would generate, (but you would only look at the local visitor sales as new or increased, if these are sales that would not have occurred in the region without this activity). Regardless of whether they are local visitors or non-local visitors, they will spend money and generate sales tax revenues while in the study region. I hope this gives you a start on how you might want to set this problem up.

Thank you for your response. We do have estimates for the visitor spending very much like the table you gave us for each of the 5 years. When I create a New Event, I have to select a sector for the visitors. Which sector would be a good fit for this purpose? The spending amount estimate should be entered in the "industry sales" tab right? I think I got it! For each type of response you chose an industry. For instance if we know they are going to spend the night, the "sector" would be "Hotels and Motels" and under industry sales I would use the numbers that are estimated prices for the rooms times the number of visitors. For spending on food, I would use "food Services and drinking places" and so on. Am I looking at this correctly? Thank you,

Hi Jeff, You are right! You've got it! If you are doing this survey and analysis just once than you are exactly correct you will set up an Activity and a Scenario for each visitor type, and the Event lines will describe how the tourists spend their funds. Such as: Hotels- Sector 411- Industry Sales = $150.00/night * 150 visitor nights However if you may be doing this type of analysis each year or for several different events that will have the same spending patterns for each Event you can add an extra level of flexibility to your analysis by entering the Industry Sales = the amount spent per tourist or group (whatever you measure is) and use the Activity Level to set the number of tourists/groups that are attending. This allows you to look at the same event but change the number of visitors without having to recalculate all the Industry Sales values. Hopefully this helps get you started. Please let me know if you need any additional assistance.

I understand! Thank you so much! Appreciate all your help!

I have a question about the tax calculation on Implan. I downloaded the tax impact and see this: 12001 15014 Social Ins Tax- Employee Contribution $1,358.00 12001 15015 Social Ins Tax- Employer Contribution $2,670.00 I thought the employer contribution should be the same as employee contribution. In each of the cases I have run I see this to be the case. Could you please let me know how this is setup? I assume that it does take into account local tax rates for this.

Hi Jeff, 12001 represents State & Local Government payments to their employees' pension fund and is usually greater than the employees' contribution. This is a special circumstance that occurs for these workers. Please let us know if we can help further.

Thank you, Appreciate all your help!