UK small businesses boosted by a year of positive sales growth

London – 28 April, 2022 – Small businesses in the UK have charted a full year of positive sales growth, showing a more consistent recovery for the post-pandemic economy, according to new insights from Xero, the global small business platform.

The Xero Small Business Index, based on anonymised and aggregated data from hundreds of thousands of small businesses, rose to 92 points in March. Sales grew once again in March 2022, with an increase of 13.5 percent year-on-year (y/y). This means on average, small businesses have seen year-on-year sales growth every month since March 2021.

The hospitality sector saw sales rise 86.6 percent y/y, but this was due to the poor figures at the start of the pandemic. However, even when using the two-year annualized growth adjustment, hospitality sales still increased by a strong 28.4 percent. The other strongest sectors were administrative support (25.9% y/y) and manufacturing (16.9% y/y).

In spite of challenging conditions, all regions across the UK recorded double-digit sales growth last month. Small businesses in London (17.7% y/y) spearheaded this, but also those in the North West of England (16.9% y/y).

The jobs market challenge

While positive sales growth has boosted the Index, the jobs market is proving to be a major obstacle. There are still 7.4 percent fewer people working in small businesses than there were in February 2020.

However, Scotland and London are proving to be the exception and leading the charge with more people now employed by small businesses than in February 2020. London has seen a 3.6 percent increase and Scotland a 0.1 percent increase.

In contrast, the West Midlands still has 13.2 percent fewer small business jobs and the South East 12.4 percent, than before the start of the first lockdown.

The Index also reveals that wages grew 4.2 percent y/y in March, representing the third consecutive month of wage growth over 4 percent. These numbers, in part, reflect catch-up after very low wage growth through 2020 and early 2021. However, rising inflation and the challenging jobs market are forcing small businesses to pay higher wages to navigate a reduced talent pool.

Alex von Schirmeister, UK & EMEA Managing Director at Xero, said: “It would be too easy to celebrate this post-pandemic growth and recovery. The stark reality is that small businesses are still facing real uncertainty and headwinds, with inflation, access to staff, and geopolitical risks as chief concerns.

“We need the Government to do more to help support and nurture small businesses, which are the backbone of the UK’s economy”

More information on the Xero Small Business Index March metrics is available here.

-ENDS-

Media Contact

Robyn Greenacre | Xero UK Communications | Robyn.Greenacre@xero.com | 07976005232

About Xero

Xero is a cloud-based accounting software platform for small businesses with over 3 million subscribers globally. Through Xero, small business owners and their advisors have access to real-time financial data any time, anywhere and on any device. Xero offers an ecosystem of over 1,000 third-party apps and 300 plus connections to banks and other financial partners. For three consecutive years (2020-2022), Xero has been included in the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index. In 2021, Xero was included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), powered by the S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment and in 2020, Xero was recognized by IDC MarketScape as a leader in its worldwide SaaS and cloud-enabled small business finance and accounting applications vendor assessment.

About Xero Small Business Insights

Xero Small Business Insights was developed to create insights to help inform decision makers in support of the small business economy as a whole. The principal source of small business insights in this report is customer data from Xero - a small business platform that supports online accounting and a range of other applications. Xero is a responsible custodian of our customers’ sensitive data and does not release any data that could identify individual businesses. The data used is aggregated and anonymised to ensure the privacy of Xero subscribers, and their counterparts.