Every month, more than 533,000 small businesses on the QuickBooks platform feed anonymized data into a digital pulse check on three major economies. The Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Index has become a rare real-time window into employment trends, revenue patterns, and job vacancies across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—capturing a remarkably broad snapshot of what happens when small businesses, the backbone of these economies, decide to hire, expand, or contract.
What makes this index matter is timing and scale. Official government employment reports can lag by weeks or months; the Small Business Index delivers monthly updates with current-month data published at the beginning of the following month. And the coverage is substantial. In the US, the index tracks approximately 75% of all employers and 10% of all jobs, drawing from a sample of at least 420,000 small businesses for employment metrics and 333,000 for revenue analysis. In Canada, it captures 90% of all employers and 25% of all jobs, powered by data from 87,000 small businesses tracking firms with 1 to 19 employees. The UK sample, from 26,000 small businesses, covers 80% of employers and 20% of jobs, monitoring companies with 1 to 9 employees.
The index measures different signals depending on the country. Across all three nations, it tracks current employment levels at small businesses—the number of jobs that actually exist on any given month. In the United States alone, the index goes deeper, revealing monthly revenue figures for small businesses adjusted for inflation, providing an economic indicator that extends beyond headcount to show whether these businesses are actually earning more. The UK adds another dimension: job vacancy data, illuminating demand for workers and potential labor market tightness at the grassroots level.
The methodology is rigorous. Data flows from payroll and invoice records managed on QuickBooks—real financial transactions, not surveys. Before publication, this information is anonymized, adjusted against official statistics to account for selection bias, and aggregated by country, region, or sector. In the United States, granular reporting is available for 20 individual states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. All figures are seasonally adjusted to smooth out predictable fluctuations tied to holidays and seasonal business cycles.
The index publishes monthly, but the story doesn't stop there. QuickBooks supplements the monthly releases with quarterly and annual reports that layer in additional insights from official statistics and their own Small Business Insights survey, helping economists and policymakers spot emerging trends before they fully materialize in traditional employment reports.
For small business owners, economists, and policymakers watching these three economies, the index fills a critical gap. It answers the question that matters most in real time: what are small businesses actually doing right now? Are they hiring or pulling back? Are revenues growing or shrinking? Is there demand for workers? In an economic landscape where small businesses account for the majority of job creation and employment, that monthly window into their decisions has become invaluable.