From the Membership Coordinator: Tips for Filling Out ABACUS

ABA’s financial ABACUS survey is due July 3, and we’re encouraging SIBA members to participate. Filling out ABACUS can be intimidating, and thinking about where to find all the data is exhausting. But ABACUS is extremely useful for your store for a couple of reasons. First, it forces you to take a good look at your store’s finances. Secondly, being able to compare your store’s data with other similar stores allows you to get objective feedback about where your strengths and weaknesses are. Numbers don’t lie! 

For ABACUS to work best, we need as many stores filling it out as possible. It’s important that the data collected come from a wide range of stores with different business models so we can get a more accurate picture, both for the industry and for stores’ own comparisons. No store is too small or insignificant!

The ABA has posted a PDF of the current survey questions that you can download ahead of time to preview and collect your answers before submitting. You can also review the ABACUS page on Bookweb.org for more information.

To successfully fill out ABACUS, start with these steps:

1. Gather and document basic information for your store and community, including: 
• Number of locations
• Square footage
• Years in business
• Business model (pop-up, brick-and-mortar, co-op, nonprofit, etc.)
• Store focus (children’s, genre, BIPOC, etc.)
• POS system and accounting system
• E-commerce platform
• Accounting method (cash or accrual)
• Type of community (urban, suburban, rural)
• Community population
• Number of staff
• Local/state minimum wage rate
• Starting pay rate for your booksellers
• Annual salaries for managers, buyers, event coordinators, & booksellers (you may need to do the math to convert hourly employees to an annual number)
• How often you conduct a physical inventory
• Whether you offer online sales, have a Bookshop.org account, and/or sell e-books and audiobooks
• TIP: Since the answers to these questions aren’t likely to change often, keep them documented somewhere easy to find next year!    
  
  
2. Categorize your expenses into these three sections that ABACUS will ask you to report on: 
• Payroll (all payroll costs)
• Occupancy (all costs related to your store’s physical space)
• Operations (everything else)
  
  
3. Run your profit & loss report for 2023, or your most recent fiscal year. This is found in your accounting software, e.g. Quickbooks, Sage, etc.
   
   
4. Gather specific data, including: 
• The number of unique titles you have in your store as of the end of 2025
• The total number of books you have in your store as of the end of 2025
• Net Sales (this will show on your profit & loss report as the top line and is Total Sales minus Customer Returns/Refunds, including online sales but excluding Bookshop.org sales)
• Specific e-book and audiobook sales
• Dollar value of online sales excluding Bookshop.org
• Total proceeds from Bookshop.org
• Accounts payable more than 90 days old
• Total number of customer register transactions for the year (found in your POS system typically)
• Percentage of sales from offsite events, children’s/YA, remainders, and credit card/electronic transactions (you’ll likely need to break out these categories of sales)
• Co-op dollars received (if any)
• Any grants or other income received

Most of this data will be found in either your point of sale system or in your accounting software (if you’re keeping up with data entry!). In some cases, the data may not be as easy to access as it seems, for example, if you don’t break out your sales into those specific categories ABACUS asks for. In these cases, consider if there might be an easy fix you can put in place to make the data more accessible next year, like breaking out the sales categories in your accounting software. Just make sure that you consult with your accountant before making any changes so you can be mindful of potential implications those changes may have. 

I have a document where I store all the general information about my store and community that doesn’t change often and update it when something does change, and doing that saves me a TON of time because I don’t have to find that information every year! I also created overall heading categories within my accounting software in my Chart of Accounts for Payroll, Occupancy, and Operations and made notes under each expense regarding where it fits so I can organize it in a way that makes it easier to find the data ABACUS needs each year. Finally, I make sure to break out the sales categories ABACUS looks for so that data is handy. Making these small changes in my accounting system (after consulting with my accountant!) saves me HOURS of work finding all this data for ABACUS when the survey comes around. My best advice for this year is to follow the steps above, gather all your data, and make sure you document the process and where the data is found to make it easier next time. 

Good luck, SIBA friends!