Intuit Quickbooks Small Business Index

Small and young businesses are essential for job creation, innovation, and economic growth. Even most of the superstar firms start their business life small and then grow over time. Small firms have less internal resources which makes them more fragile and sensitive to macroeconomic conditions. This suggests the need for frequent and real-time monitoring of the small business sector’s health, yet this has been made difficult due to lack of appropriate data.

In partnership with Intuit Quickbooks, Akcigit, Chhina, Cilasun, Miranda, Ocakverdi, and Nicholas Serrano-Velarde (2023) fills this important gap by developing a new “Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Index” for the smallest of small businesses with at most 9 workers in the US and the UK and at most 19 workers in Canada.

The Index aggregates a sample of anonymous QuickBooks Online Payroll subscriber data (QBO Payroll sample) from 333,000 businesses in the US, 66,000 in Canada, and 25,000 in the UK.

The details of the index can be found here.