RTSrevs is a shiny program to analyze monthly revisions to the monthly growth rates of retail sales by industry, as estimated by Statistics Canada's Retail Trade Survey. Both the total and 29 sub-industries are analyzed. These monthly time series are key economic indicators, measuring the monthly pulse of sales in the economy. However, the initial estimates are only useful to the extent they are accurate the first time around. If the initial estimates are frequently revised substantially in later months, that would undercut their usefulness as timely measures.

The database comes from Statistics Canada and includes all 'vintages' of the estimates from January 2015 to date. The agency releases the initial estimates for a given reference month with a lag of about two months. Thereafter, it revises the estimates in subsequent months. The target variable is the month-to-month growth rate, rather than the level of retail sales. The observations consist of the revisions for the 71 reference months between February 2015 and December 2020. The program displays scatter diagrams, autocorrelation charts, estimated probability densities, measures of central tendency and charts showing the evolution of the growth rate estimates over time for each of the 71 reference months individually.