On April 23rd we posted Getting Your Trade Data Faster, a blog that introduced the new Advance Report that the U.S. Census Bureau will introduce in July 2015. We know you are excited for this new report and we wanted to keep you in the loop and help address some questions you may have.

The Advance Report will contain seasonally adjusted and not-seasonally adjusted export and import goods data by 1-digit end-use categories and balance totals.It will contain monthly data for the current year, as well as the full previous year.The Advance Report will not include services or trade in goods on a balance of payments basis. To see the sample layout, go to: www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/notices/Advance_Report.pdf.

At this time, there are no plans to publish at the 5-digit end-use level.

The Advance Report will be published monthly, and the first release is scheduled for July 30, 2015. The Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) will continue to jointly release the full FT-900: U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services (FT-900) report approximately 35 calendar days after the reference month ends.The new Advance Report will be published approximately a week sooner.

The release schedule for the Advance Report for the remainder of the year is as follows:

The Report will be released at 8:30 a.m.

With the first release of this report, we will provide data monthly, from January 2013 to June 2015.

No, there will be no country information included in the Advance Report.

Private sector data users and other government agencies will both benefit from an earlier release of U.S. trade data. The Advance Report allows policymakers and private data users to make data-driven decisions sooner due to this high-level “snapshot” of trade in goods. In addition, the release will also allow BEA to incorporate export and import data from the third month of a quarter into the advance quarterly estimate of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), thereby producing a more complete quarterly estimate. The advance GDP estimate offers the first glimpse of the broadest measure of how the U.S. economy is performing for any given quarter.