Document preparation services
This industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in writing, editing or proofreading documents; providing word processing or desktop publishing services; and providing stenographic (except court or stenographic reporting), transcription and other secretarial services. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 332
- Under 10 employeesA
- 83%
- Establishments · USA
- 4,925
- Employment · USA
- 43,927
- Payroll · USA
- $1.6B
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 332 Canadian establishments with employees, 83% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 561, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Janitorial, landscaping, security and staffing: low capital and easy to start, so margins are competed down to labour cost. Route density and contract retention decide the outcome.
- Who sets the price
- Tender and the client's procurement; labour is most of the cost.
- The software it runs on
- Workforce scheduling, route and work-order management, staffing front and back office.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 5614 Business support services covers it.
NiCE at $2.95B and Five9 at $1.15B are both growing double digits and both now selling AI deflection into the same seat count — which is the harder fact for an entrant: the incumbents are already pricing the transition away from per-seat licensing, and they hold the telephony and compliance-recording integrations that make a contact centre switchable at all.
This record covers the outsourcer that employs the agents. The contact-centre software is screened at 5614, collections software at 561440 and back-office outsourcing at 5611. The business is real and needs little capital: Canada has 572 call-centre establishments with employees, and 52 of them employ 500 or more [A]. A mid-size Canadian operator can still attract a buyer: Frontenac recapitalized Barrie-based Bill Gosling Outsourcing in March 2026 [B]. The cut is who sets the price of an agent hour. The client prices onshore work against two benchmarks: Manila, and now a bot. Concentrix delivered $1.59B of fiscal 2025 revenue from the Philippines and $302M from Canada [A]. IBEX has 97% of its on-site capacity offshore or nearshore [A]. Contracts are written per minute, per hour or per transaction, with bonuses and penalties [A], so an automation saving can flow to the client at renewal. The listed scale players show what that costs. Teleperformance, the leader with about 10% of the outsourced CX market, had €10.2B of 2025 revenue, down 0.7%, and AI IT costs took 15 bps off its margin [A]. Concentrix booked a $1.52B goodwill impairment [A]. TTEC's Q2 2026 revenue fell 11.3% and its lenders' margin is due to rise to 6.25% [A]. Concentration adds to the buyer's leverage: Meta was 26% of TaskUs revenue and TTEC's top five clients were 30.6% [A]. In Canada the jobs sit where wages are low: the median call-centre agent wage is $18.53 an hour in Nova Scotia and $17.30 in PEI, against $23.35 in BC [A]. That makes these sites cheap to open and also cheap to move. The entrant sells hours whose price the buyer sets against cheaper delivery, so willingness to pay decides it.
What this category is. The system of record for money that is already late: the account and its history, the strategy that decides who is called, texted or emailed and when, the consent and contact-frequency rules that keep that outreach legal, the payment portal and plan, and the hand-off to agencies, debt buyers and lawyers. It is bought by two groups: collection agencies and debt buyers (the coded customer, 561440), and the first-party recovery desks of lenders, telecoms, utilities and hospitals. How it differs from the neighbouring records. The contact-centre record (5614) sells the dialer and agent desktop; Genesys appears here only because it still owns Latitude, a collections system Interactive Intelligence bought for about $14M in 2010 when it earned about $7.8M a year [B]. Healthcare revenue cycle (621) holds claims and patient statements; Finvi's Artiva HCx sits on that border. Core banking (5221) is the ledger a lender's collections system reads from, and loan origination (5222) is the decision at the front of the same loan. This record is the back end of the credit cycle. Who holds it. The enterprise first-party desk is held by C&R Software's Debt Manager, the former FICO collections business that Constellation Software's Jonas group bought in 2021 [A, company history; B, BIIA]; C&R says $8 trillion+ of balances are managed on Debt Manager as a system of record [C]. Experian sells PowerCurve Collections as a module of its decisioning platform [A, product page]. In Europe, EXUS (London, since 1989, 50+ countries) and Qualco (the technology arm of the Greek Qualco Group) are the comparable platforms [C]. The agency side is held by Finvi, the former Ontario Systems, which renamed itself in October 2021 and bought Katabat, a cloud first-party platform, in August 2021 to reach what it called a $2.5B+ first-party market [A for the deals, C for the figure]; and, for small agencies, by Collect! from Comtech Systems in Victoria, BC, which says 1,400+ companies in 40 countries use it, since 1988 [C]. The challengers mostly became agencies. TrueAccord, the best-known digital-first entrant (founded 2013, about $35M raised by its 2017 Series B led by Arbor Ventures [B]), describes itself as 'a full-service digital-first debt collection agency' and lists its state licences [A, own site]. InDebted (Sydney) is also a licensed collector; it bought the Hamburg collections-decisioning software Receeve in December 2024 to sell white-label software to banks alongside its own collecting [A]. That is the pattern: the AI-and-digital wedge was taken years ago, and the firms that took it earn contingency fees, not licence fees. The pure-software challengers are Symend (Calgary; behavioural-science engagement for telecoms, banks and utilities; about C$184M raised: C$73M Series B in 2020, a C$54M extension in February 2021 and C$54M more in November 2022, all led by Inovia, then a 25% staff cut in March 2023 [B]), Prodigal (Mountain View; AI agents for servicing and collections; $12M Series A led by Menlo Ventures in 2021 [A]), Credgenics (Noida; $50M Series B led by WestBridge and Accel in August 2023 at a $340M valuation [A]) and collectAI (Hamburg, owned by Aareal Bank Group since 2022 [B]). Regulation is a moat for the incumbents, not an opening. In the US, Regulation F (12 CFR 1006) sets rules for communications, harassment and electronic contact by FDCPA debt collectors [A, CFPB]; in Ontario, no one may carry on the business of a collection agency unless registered under the Collection and Debt Settlement Services Act [A, e-Laws], and every province has its own regime. Each rule change is a release the installed vendor ships to all its customers at once. Incumbent vulnerability decides it. The enterprise desk sits with a Constellation subsidiary that holds what it buys, Experian, and two European specialists; the agency desk sits with Finvi and Collect!; and the digital entrants with the most capital chose to be collectors themselves. A new vendor would sell to an agency industry that is consolidating, against contracts that hold years of account history and compliance configuration.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
Sold across the wider branch
And what every business buys · 33 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Administrative and support, waste management and remediation services, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. But note the shape of this industry: 83% of establishments have fewer than ten employees, and at that size most of these roles are one person wearing several hats, or bought in from outside.
Inside this industry
1 row sits directly beneath 56141. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 561410 | Document preparation services | 332 | screened at 5614 |
Alongside it, under 5614 Business support services
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 56142 | Telephone call centres | 572 | Outsourced Contact Centres & CX BPO |
| 56143 | Business service centres | 491 | screened at 5614 |
| 56144 | Collection agencies | 189 | Collections and Recovery Software |
| 56145 | Credit bureaus | 57 | screened at 5614 |
| 56149 | Other business support services | 1,122 | screened at 5614 |