Xero, a global platform for small businesses, has published two reports examining the economic and emotional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on small businesses worldwide.

Source: Xero’s Emotional metrics: small business mindsets during the pandemic report. From January to August 2020, small business owners experienced a range of emotions, from feeling “worn down” to a sense of loss.

The Xero Small Business Insights (SBI) Special Report, Pandemic Insights: Small Business Experience, was created in collaboration with AlphaBeta (part of Accenture) and utilizes anonymized and aggregated data from over 300,000 Xero subscribers. The report illustrates the pandemic’s consequences on small business revenue and employment in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Customer survey data supports these insights in North America and Asia.

● Following the March lockdown, New Zealand saw the greatest revenue decline at 40% but has since rebounded.

● Australian small businesses experienced the highest job losses, reaching 12% at their peak.

● Manufacturing is driving recovery in New Zealand and Australia, with revenue increasing between 1% and 13%.

● Small businesses were impacted twice as severely as larger corporations.

● Businesses utilizing technology generally experienced 40% fewer job losses.

“The ability to offer insights on this scale quickly, with cross-country comparisons, allows for a better understanding of how to support small business recovery globally,” said Steve Vamos, CEO of Xero.

“Small businesses are an integral part of our families and communities. They are a significant engine for economic growth and innovation, and they are facing significant challenges at the moment.”

Xero’s second report, Emotional metrics: small business mindsets during the pandemic, uses research from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, North America, and Singapore to concentrate on the human impact of the crisis. According to Xero, the nature of small businesses means that owners frequently have close personal relationships with their employees and customers. The disruption generated by a pandemic has financial ramifications for small business owners, as well as problems managing the human impact.

According to the study, 43% of small business owners in these nations are concerned about their mental health, while 39% are concerned about the mental health of their employees. According to data from Mindset AI*, a sentiment measurement technology, the most common emotion among small businesses is “worn down.”

“We’ve discovered various Xero small business clients who have survived the Spanish Flu of 1918 and are still in operation today, including a winery in South Australia and a pie and eel shop in London,” Vamos stated.

“It’s remarkable to believe that these businesses have already weathered a global pandemic, as well as numerous other major economic upheavals since then, and are still operating during this current crisis. We are amazed by their tenacity,” he said.

Xero is a cloud-based accounting software platform for small businesses, with 2.38 million subscribers worldwide. Xero has a thriving ecosystem of over 800 third-party apps and over 200 connections to banks and other financial institutions. According to Xero, the Xero Small Business Insights (SBI) program analyzes the sector’s health using anonymized, aggregated data from hundreds of thousands of Xero subscribers. This method produces a picture of business conditions that is more accurate than most private surveys, which typically have a far smaller sample size.

Details:

Read the Pandemic Insights: Small Business Experience report

Read the Emotional metrics: small business mindsets during the pandemic report.

*Mindset AI Study, PepperComm, August 2020. Mindset.AI, run by integrated marketing and communications firm Peppercomm, analyzes millions of public conversations from thousands of different Internet sources using sophisticated artificial intelligence to investigate crisis-related emotional states.