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 the share of women-owned and minority-owned businesses in NAICS 541 (professional services) for the 10 states where you spend the most on external vendors.
The Census Annual Business Survey (ABS) is the authoritative source for this data. Your procurement team has never pulled ABS data before. You have been handed the task with no context and a tight deadline.
The bad version:
- You search for Census ABS and find the data.census.gov table interface
- You configure the NAICS and geography filters and realize ABS is a separate Census program with its own access point
- You find the ABS API documentation, which requires a different endpoint and parameter set from the ACS
- You get the first state working and realize the response gives you firm counts by owner category but the category codes are two-letter strings with no labels
- You look up the ABS code book, translate 10 states × 8 owner categories, and rebuild the table
- 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 spreadsheet 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 sheet, 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 sheet with labeled columns. 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 and academic supplier-diversity research.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
ABS queries have some specific edge cases when scoping across states and NAICS codes.
When you need to filter to a specific owner category
Your procurement team cares specifically about veteran-owned firms in addition to women-owned and minority-owned.
For each state in my sheet, 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 in my sheet alongside the total firm count.
When you want to compare two NAICS codes side by side
Your board wants to see NAICS 541 (professional services) next to NAICS 561 (administrative support) to compare supplier-diversity penetration across service categories.
Fetch Census ABS company summary data for NAICS 541 and NAICS 561 for each state in my sheet, 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 to highlight where diversity supplier pools are deepest.
Query Census ABS for NAICS 541 in all states in my sheet. 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 local market potential score
Your strategic sourcing team wants to know not just where diverse suppliers are concentrated but also where those suppliers operate in higher-income markets.
For each state in my sheet, 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 actually use already in the sheet.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet 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 Google Sheets overview.