Methodology
The survey data used in this report comes from the Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Insights survey, an international, quarterly survey of small business health, opinions, and priorities commissioned by Intuit QuickBooks every three months since its launch in September 2021.
The findings in this analysis are based on the February 2025 survey of 2,487 US small businesses with 0-100 employees. The research focused on understanding the impact of payment and invoicing practices on various aspects of business health.
All findings included are statistically significant. This indicates that observed results are highly unlikely to have occurred by random chance, suggesting a genuine relationship or effect.
The data was analyzed in two main ways:
- Overdue Invoices: The second analysis examined the relationship between the percentage of overdue invoices (categorized as 0%, 1-19%, 20-39%, 40-59%, 60-79%, and 80-100%, then grouped into 0-19% and 20-100%) and the same business aspects mentioned above.
*“47% had invoices overdue by 30+ days*” is the aggregated number of respondents who didn’t choose “0%” in response to this question.
- Payment Terms: The first analysis compared how different payment terms (Immediate, Within 30 days, Within 90 days, and Other) influenced financing, cash flow, sales, financial health, digitization, workforce, hiring, and retention. Findings compare immediate versus 90-day payment term outcomes.
Participants are small business owners and decision-makers from two sources:
- Dynata panel: Minimum 3,350 survey respondents per wave. Of these, at least 1,500 are from the US, at least 600 are from Canada, at least 750 are from the UK, and at least 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.
- 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.