Generally they are just goods.

It’s much easier to measure physical goods crossing customs. It’s very difficult to measure whether that guy in your restaurant was a tourist or not. And that’s the simple case believe it or not…

This is one of the reasons service oriented economies seem to run huge deficits…

I software and IT services (cloud) etc. "goods" or not here? As far as I know that very large sector is not included in that calculation. A follow up question is how US company subsidiaries located in Europe are counted - the gains all end up in the US eventually (or at the very least the money streams are under US control), but it does not count as a US export? I have sooo many questions.

Everything is Microsoft and Co. in Europe and elsewhere, both the OS and things like AWS or Office 365 subscriptions.

I reckon both Mastercard and Visa will give you really damn good proxies for cross border money flows.