Dear All,
Tonight we will release a fix for the number of employees and related factors. We discovered that FactSet has another separate line item used when a company reports the "average employees" for the year, instead of the more traditional headcount at the end of the year. It's almost always mutually exclusive: either they give us the number of employees at the end of the year, or the average.
Since they are mutually exclusive we decided to use average employees when the other is not available. The end result is that, after tonight reload, you will see more companies with a value for employees:
In USA 85 more companies (7121→7206)
In CAN 7 more companies (671→678)
In EUR 1,755 more companies (5778→7533)
The following functions and related factors are affected
NoEmp
IncPerEmp
SalesPerEmp
This change is way more significant for Europe, a whopping 30%. Historically it's even more with around double the number of companies with values. I guess it's more common to report averages there, while in USA it's the headcount at the end of year. BTW, this problem was uncovered because SPOT:USA (Swedish company) has N/A for employees, and in their 10K it is clearly reported as an average.
If you rely on this factor, specially in Europe, you should re-run your strategies to see the impact.
Sorry we didn't catch this sooner. Let us know if you have any questions.