Harrogate Business Improvement District is introducing a data platform to track consumer spending patterns across the town, supported by funding from the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority’s Vibrant and Sustainable High Streets Fund.
The BID will use Beauclair, a system that analyses anonymised UK debit card transactions, including mobile wallet payments. Its dataset covers 1.7 billion transactions and provides details on spend value, transaction volume, and activity across retail categories. The platform also offers consumer profiling, showing visitor origins, economic segments, and spending behaviour.
Bethany Allen, Harrogate BID Operations Manager, said: “At the BID, we are very excited to get our heads into the new data, seeing the footfall trends in our town is great but having the spend data to go alongside it will allow us to really delve deeper. We know that footfall data is important to our BID Members but this spend data will really solidify the spending patterns of our visitors and residents throughout the year, so we hope the system will be very useful to all of our members. We are extremely grateful to have been awarded funding from the Vibrant and Sustainable High Streets Fund through the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority to allow us to provide this system to our BID Members.”
The tool will help the BID assess the strength of high street performance, benchmark Harrogate against national and comparable locations, and demonstrate return on investment across business-facing projects. It will operate alongside the BID’s existing footfall data.
Beauclair is already used in York, Chester, and Manchester city centre for spend-tracking. Harrogate BID plans to distribute monthly reports to levy payers and share insights with partners around major events and seasonal trading periods.
