This is a voluntary poll, not a survey of UK businesses. People choose to answer, the results are unweighted, and no margin of error can be calculated. It is not representative of UK businesses. For representative measures see the ICAEW Business Confidence Monitor, the Bank of England Decision Maker Panel and the ONS Business Insights and Conditions Survey. Answers are anonymous and are not linked to any financial figures. Privacy notice
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How it works
- The scale. Each answer is scored +100 (much better), +50, 0, −50 or −100 (much worse), and averaged, as in the ICAEW Business Confidence Monitor. "Don't know" is left out of the score. A score above +10 is labelled net bullish, below −10 net bearish, and anything in between broadly neutral.
- Publication rules. We publish only when at least 30 people have answered each question, and use a rolling three-month figure until there are at least 100 a month. Month-on-month changes at these sizes are mostly noise, so we show the full spread of answers, not just the average.
- Risks. The open answers are grouped by hand into a fixed list of themes (demand, input costs, energy, labour costs, recruitment, tax, interest rates and finance, cash flow and late payment, regulation, geopolitics and trade, policy uncertainty, technology). We publish the share of answers naming each theme, never the answers themselves, and the original text is deleted after grouping.
- Who answers. People who use our free tools, and visitors from the SME conditions page and LinkedIn. Both groups lean towards finance-aware owners and advisers.