One of the most important things you should know creditors look at to determine your company’s creditworthiness is your business credit score.
Does your business have a positive credit file established with Small Business Equifax, Corporate Experian, and Dun and Bradstreet? The reason why this is so significant is because each creditor, lender, or supplier may pull a business credit report from one, two, or all three of these bureaus when you apply for credit.
So, here are 5 ways to understand your business credit score making it easier for you to grasp how the scoring process works.
1) Credit:
The number of trade experiences, balances outstanding, payment habits, credit utilization and trends over time all play a role in what makes up your scores.
2) Account Types:
The types of credit your company has reporting such as trade credit, commercial credit cards, lines of credit, term loans, business leases, and letters of credit clearly show how your business handles various types of financing.
3) Inquiries:
The number of business credit inquiries or applications that are generated by your business. Ex
Major credit card issuers are targeting small business owners in an all out effort to expand its commercial credit card business.
According to Synovate, issuers sent out a whopping 46 million commercial credit card offers in just the first quarter of 2010! That’s over a 250% increase from the previous year while consumer credit card offers only increased by 29%.
With these types of numbers it’s led people like Senator Charles Schumer to believe that credit card issuers are attempting to evade the new restrictions on consumer cards.
Even though the CARD Act does not address commercial credit cards business owners should take a careful look at the benefits that these cards provide over personal credit cards.
Here are some of the major benefits:
Obtain higher credit limits
Build business credit files
Protect personal credit files
Control employee spending
Take advantage of business perks
These benefits alone should give you reason enough to utilize commercial credit cards for your company. But
Monitoring and protecting the credit reports you’ve established for your business should be a part of your company’s overall strategy.
Why is it so important?
First of all, before you apply for credit with a supplier or lender you should know firsthand where you stand with your reports and scores. This will give you better insight into what type of financing you may qualify for ahead of time and whether or not the time is right to apply.
Secondly, consumers are not the only target when it comes to identity theft so in order to protect your company you must keep a close eye on any unusual activity on your reports.
Finally, if any errors or outdated information appears on your business credit reports you can take the necessary steps to correct the mistakes.
Incorrect information can jeopardize your company’s ability to obtain credit so correcting errors plays a key part in business monitoring.
Now that you know the importance of monitoring your business credit let’s review some of the services that are available from each of the major business credit bureaus.
Business Credit Advantage – Experian
This service offers all the goodies that a business monitoring service should include like:
Unlimited access to your report and score
Tracking of any changes to your files
Continuous monitoring
Recently Experian just announced a newly added feature called email alerts. It gives yo
In a press release today US Bank announced the launch of a new online payment management tool called ScoreBoard for its US Bank Visa small business credit cardholders.
In an effort to empower business owners with better management and decision making tools it can quite possibly set a new standard in services available to business credit cardholders.
ScoreBoard is an online tool that cardholders can access via their U.S. Bank Internet Banking Account and it provides two main features.
First, you can monitor all of your company’s credit card spending using various reporting formats. This can help you track spending patterns on an individual cardholder or on a company wide basis. In my opinion this is a good step towards making better sound financial decisions for your company.
