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The benchmark for Italian small & medium enterprise performance, built on real cash flows and account transactions.
Index evolution over time and trend.
The Prestatech SME Business Activity 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 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.
The index is built on real cash inflows recorded on Italian business bank accounts. 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.
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. All values are expressed relative to the 2023 annual average = 100.