In our last blog post, we explored how employment numbers are recorded among U.S. firms at a single point each year—March 12—and how this approach fails to capture the volatility of employment among small firms with 1–20 workers. In today’s post, we use new data from the SFD USA sample to further illustrate this point.

When trying to better understand small firms, some of the most important questions center on employment and jobs: How many jobs do small firms create? What is the quality of those jobs - particularly in terms of stability and security? Much of what we know about small firms comes from federal data, but like any data source, there are very real constraints that inhibit the insight provided by the available data. 

In the United States, even the smallest businesses are connected to a digital ecosystem. We’ve found that the firms in the Small Firm Diaries USA study typically prepare records for quarterly or annual tax filings on some type of software, and these records are often linked to other digital financial information including bank and credit card accounts, point-of-sale (POS) and payroll services.  This means that for the US arm of the study, the research team can draw on existin

On November 19, 2025, FAI hosted a faiVLive webinar to introduce the Small Firm Diaries USA study. We shared early observations, and talked with expert panelists about how recent policy and program changes are affecting small businesses and organizations that support them.