Small Business Insights: Quarterly survey of small businesses in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia

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Sample and methodology

About the respondents (demographics)

About the respondents' small businesses (firmographics)

Methodology

Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Insights is an international, quarterly survey of small business health, opinions, and priorities commissioned by Intuit QuickBooks every three months since its launch in September 2021. Each wave has been fielded among small businesses in the US, Canada, and the UK. In April 2024, the survey was expanded to include small businesses in Australia as well.

Participants are small business owners and decision-makers from two sources:

1. Dynata panel: 3,350 survey respondents per wave. Of these, 1,500 are from the US small businesses, 600 are from Canada, 750 are from the UK, and 500 are from Australia. On average, more than 50% of the respondents are small business owners. The remainder are senior decision-makers within small businesses who have a detailed knowledge of their employer's financial performance, workforce strategy, and business priorities. For each wave of the survey, 50% of the sample are repeat respondents who have previously taken the survey to allow opinions and business health to be tracked more effectively over time. Respondents receive remuneration. All responses are anonymous. In the US, Canada, and the UK, all respondents are from small businesses with 0 to 100 employees. In Australia, all respondents are from small businesses with 0 to 50 employees. Every effort is made to make these samples as representative as possible of small businesses in each country but as with all online surveys, there are limitations. To give the largest possible sample size for each wave of the survey, responses from the Dynata panel are combined with responses from the QuickBooks customer panel, described below, whenever possible.
2. Intuit QuickBooks customer panel: The number of survey participants drawn from the Intuit QuickBooks customer base varies over time but the average is 2,000 respondents per wave. In the April 2024 wave, for example, the total number of QuickBooks customer respondents was 2,300; comprising 1,505 in the US, 405 in Canada, and 405 in the UK. Currently, the survey is not fielded among QuickBooks customers in Australia. Respondents are drawn from a pool of QuickBooks Online subscribers in the US, Canada, and the UK who have been active in their accounts in the past 30 days. As with the Dynata audience panel described above, respondents in the US, Canada, and the UK are typically from small businesses with 0 to 100 employees.

For clarity, percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number so in some of the stacked column charts shown above, survey responses may not add up to 100% but 99% or 101%, for example, instead. Please also note that all responses to multiple choice questions are shown as a percentage of the total number of respondents, not the total number of responses, to better reflect the number of people who chose each answer option. As a result, in the corresponding grouped column charts shown above, the sum of the percentages will always be greater than 100.

Disclaimer

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