Household Budget Survey

The monitoring period of household consumption: instructions for using the application

The monitoring includes collection of receipts and marking of purchases without receipts by means of an application downloaded on the phone or a paper notebook and a receipt bag. The time of the 14-day monitoring period is agreed in the preliminary interview.

Using the application:

1. Download the application for the Household Budget Survey on your smartphone or tablet according to the instructions you received from your statistical interviewer.

• The application can be found in your phone's application store with the keyword “Kulutustutkimus”.
• The application is published by Statistics Finland.

2. Log in to the application with the identifiers sent by the interviewer.

3. From the front page of the application you can see the overall situation of your household.

• The monitoring period shown in the application calendar is determined based on when you first log in to the application.
• Always follow the dates agreed on with the statistical interviewer.

4. You can turn on daily reminders for the monitoring period from the settings section.

5. The monitoring period is primarily carried out by collecting purchase receipts. To take a photo of a receipt, press the plus button and select the camera symbol.

• Set the receipt straight against a uniform dark background. The back page of the material folder for the Household Budget Survey functions well as the background when taking photos of receipts.
• Ensure good lighting and take a picture of the receipt straight from above.
• Before approving a receipt, make sure that it is visible in the photo as a whole and that the texts stand out clearly.
• If the length of a receipt is over 30 cm, cut it in two and take a photo of the halves separately. This way you can make sure that you get a sufficiently accurate photo of both halves.
• Finally, fill in the data on the purchase and the total sum of the receipt requested by the application and mark the transaction as completed.

6. If your household makes purchases during the monitoring period for which no receipt has been received, enter them by pressing the plus button and select the keyboard symbol. 

• ​​Fill in the information requested by the application for each purchase without a receipt and mark the transaction as completed.

7. When all your household’s purchases for a particular day have been entered, mark the day as completed in the calendar view on the front page of the application.

8. If you have difficulties in answering, please contact your statistical interviewer or the Household Budget Survey researchers directly: kulutus.tilastokeskus@stat.fi.

9. Please keep the app and information until you receive a thank-you card for participating.

How were the respondents selected?

Households for the sample of the Household Budget Survey are drawn at random from Statistics Finland's database on the population of Finland. Those selected to the survey can be anyone aged 15 or over resident in Finland, except for those living at institutions.

How is the survey made?

The Household Budget Survey starts with a short preliminary interview. After that, the respondent chooses whether to continue responding on the telephone or via web. The duration of responding varies from half an hour to good one hour, depending on the size of the household.

In addition, households collect receipts from their purchases of daily consumer goods or record their purchases in Household Budget Survey's notebook or application for 14 days. The households are spread across the whole survey year in order to obtain information on seasonal variation in consumption.

What is asked?

The questions of the Household Budget Survey mainly concern the purchases made and services used by the household and their prices over the past 12 months. In addition, information is asked on housing and housing costs, for example.

Purchases of daily consumer goods account for around one-half of households' consumption. Data on their purchases are obtained when households collect all receipts for their purchases for 14 days.

If there is no receipt for a particular purchase, the household records the purchase in Household Budget Survey's notebook or application. If the household doesn't use the application to collect their consumption data receipts and notebooks are sent to Statistics Finland by mail.

How will Statistics Finland contact you?

In the Household Budget Survey, Statistics Finland's interviewer sends the person selected for the survey a letter containing information about the survey and saying that the interviewer will contact the person by telephone in the near future.

If the phone number of the person selected for the survey or of his/her other household members cannot be found, the household is informed by letter that no telephone number was found. When receiving such a letter, the respondent can contact the interviewer personally and agree on an interview.

Who answers the questions?

The letter is addressed to the member of the household that has been selected for the sample but any household member who knows the household's purchases and finances well can answer the questions instead. This is the case particularly when the person selected for the survey is underage.

All household members can take part in responding, so that remembering the household's purchases becomes more reliable.

Why is it important to participate in the survey?

It is very important that each household that has been selected for the survey takes part in it, as no respondent household can in any way be replaced with another respondent.

Refusal to participate in the survey means that sufficiently accurate information on the opinions and affairs of households in a similar life situation cannot be collected, which means that the representativeness of the households in the statistics weakens.

In the actual Household Budget Survey, participation of each household in the survey is extremely important in order for the published statistics to provide a correct picture of the consumption, income and living conditions of Finnish households.