Updated...

Italian
SME Index

The benchmark for Italian small & medium enterprise performance, built on real cash flows and bank account transactions.

Index value
? Seasonal adjustment removes the recurring within-year pattern (holidays, weather driven demand, etc.) from the raw index, so month to month changes reflect the underlying trend rather than the time of year. Base 100 (2023)
MoM change
YoY change
Summary

    Charts and tables

    Index trend

    Index evolution over time and trend.

    Index (seasonally adj.) Index (not seasonally adj.) Trend

    Seasonal pattern

    Average % deviation from trend for each calendar month, estimated from the recurring seasonal pattern in the historical data.

    About the Index

    What is the Index

    The Italian SME Index tracks the monthly revenue performance of Italian small and medium enterprises. It is designed to provide a timely, data driven reading of SME economic activity — one grounded in actual business transactions rather than surveys or sentiment measures.

    The index is released in the first week of the month for the prior calendar month, ahead of most official statistics. The index is then updated weekly to revise the figures as more data settles.

    Data

    The index is built on transaction data from Italian business bank accounts that has been fully anonymised and aggregated, ensuring individual businesses cannot be identified. Only inflows representing commercial revenue are included: payments received from customers for goods and services. Financing flows, fiscal receipts, and intercompany transfers are excluded.

    Only companies with annual inflows below €50 million are included, targeting the core SME segment. All figures are normalised to a per-business-day basis to remove distortions from months of different length and weekday composition.

    Construction

    Each month, only companies active in both the current and prior month are included, ensuring growth rates reflect genuine business dynamics rather than changes in sample composition. Individual growth ratios are pooled, and the median of the distribution is taken as the headline month-on-month change — a measure robust to outliers and large individual swings.

    Monthly growth rates are chain-linked into a continuous level series, preserving the full history of cumulative change. Seasonal patterns are removed using STL decomposition, estimated annually on the full history. A Henderson 13-point filter is then applied to produce the smooth trend line seen in the chart. All values are expressed relative to the 2023 annual average = 100.