The Scenario
You are the supplier-diversity officer at a large corporation. Your annual report goes to the board in four weeks and page six needs a table showing women-owned and minority-owned business shares in NAICS 541 (professional services) for the 10 states where you spend the most on external vendors.
The Census Annual Business Survey is the authoritative source. Your procurement team has never pulled ABS data. You have been handed the task with no context and a tight deadline.
The bad version:
- You find the ABS API documentation and realize it uses a different endpoint from the ACS
- You get the first state working but the response returns two-letter owner-category codes with no labels
- You find the ABS code book, translate 10 states × 8 owner categories
- You paste the numbers into Excel and build a pivot table to get women-owned share
- You spend a full day on a six-row table and still have nine more states to go.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that knows the ABS program, its owner-characteristic codes, and its NAICS filter parameters.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each state in my workbook, query the Census Annual Business Survey for NAICS 541 — pull the number of firms by owner sex and by owner race/ethnicity — and write the totals into columns B through G.
SheetXAI calls the ABS API for all 10 states, decodes the owner-category fields into plain-English column headers, and writes the firm counts into the workbook. No code book lookup required.
What You Get
A board-ready supplier-diversity table:
- Column B — total NAICS 541 firms
- Column C — women-owned firm count
- Column D — minority-owned firm count
- Column E — women-owned share (%)
- Column F — minority-owned share (%)
- Column G — data vintage year
These are Census Bureau ABS statistics, the same source cited in federal diversity-reporting frameworks.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
ABS queries in Excel have a few consistent edge cases.
When you need to add veteran-owned firms
Your procurement team cares specifically about veteran-owned firms alongside women-owned and minority-owned.
For each state in my workbook, query Census ABS for NAICS 541 — pull firm count for women-owned, minority-owned, and veteran-owned firms separately — and write each as a column alongside the total firm count.
When you want to compare two NAICS codes side by side
Your board wants NAICS 541 next to NAICS 561 to compare diversity penetration across service categories.
Fetch Census ABS company summary data for NAICS 541 and NAICS 561 for each state in my workbook, filtered to women-owned firms. Write firm count, receipts, and employment for each NAICS into separate column groups. Label the column headers clearly.
When you need to rank states by diversity concentration
Your report needs the 10 states ranked by women-owned firm share.
Query Census ABS for NAICS 541 in all states in my workbook. Calculate women-owned share as a percentage of total firms for each state. Rank the states by women-owned share descending and write the rank into a new column.
When you need ABS firm data plus ACS income data to build a market potential score
Your strategic sourcing team wants to know where diverse suppliers are concentrated in higher-income markets.
For each state in my workbook, fetch Census ABS women-owned and minority-owned firm counts for NAICS 541 into columns B and C. Also fetch ACS 5-year median household income for each state into column D. Compute a diversity market potential index as (women-owned share × 0.5 + minority-owned share × 0.5) × (median income / 80000) and write it into column E. Rank states by index descending into column F.
The pattern: supplier-diversity data and market context in one prompt, with the ranking the board will use already in the workbook.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with a list of states or NAICS codes, then ask it to pull Census ABS ownership-demographics data. The Census Bureau integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to pull County Business Patterns by NAICS code or the Census Bureau in Excel overview.