5 Business Credit Reporting Agencies You Might Not Know About

As an individual, the only credit report bureaus you need to worry about are the big 3, Experian, Equifax and Transunion. As a business owner you need to be aware of the other credit reporting agencies which could be reporting on your business credit right now. In this article I’ll show you the major credit report agencies you need to know about as a business owner to make sure your credit report is always clean and accurate.

Most of these reporting agencies allow you to setup and establish your own profile and credit history. Unfortunately, they won’t do this part of the process for you. If you’d like to establish your business credit you will need to be proactive and determine what is required to get started when dealing with each individual reporting agency.

#1 Dun and Bradstreet

Commonly referred to as D&B, Dun and Bradstreet is the primary credit reporting agency for businesses. You can use their tools to determine whether or not you should extend credit to another business and other businesses can do the same to you. Dun and Bradstreet offers their own Credit Risk Score which evaluates your financial transactions and public records to help determine how creditworthy your business is.

#2 Experian SmartBusinessReports

Experian is better known for reporting on the credit of consumers, however, they also have their own business credit reporting system known as SmartBusinessReports. Unlike Dun and Bradstreet, Experian doesn’t come up with a simple score you can use to evaluate creditworthiness. Instead you must go over the reports yourself to determine whether or not a business deserves crdit.

#3 Credit.net

Credit.net is a website run by a company called InfoUSA. They provide credit report information for about 15 million businesses. Out of this 15 million over 6 million businesses reported on are small businesses with 4 employees or less. The criteria for a Credit.net report includes how long you’ve been in business, total employees, stability in your industry as well as other public records. Credit.net does provide a business credit score and rating to help see an overview of a company’s credit history at a glance.

#4 Accurint Business

Accurint is a project created by the BBB (Better Business Bureau) and a company called LexisNexis which provides business information. Accurint’s reporting is a lot like Experian’s and can give you a profile of a company’s credit history. They only provide payment history and don’t provide any sort of scoring or rating system.

#5 ClientChecker

ClientChecker started in 2003 and focuses primarily on small businesses, freelancers and contractors looking for information that can help them to figure out what other companies they should be working with. Unlike other systems, ClientChecker collects feedback from users and doesn’t report on actual financial transactions. They don’t provide any kind of score but they do have a lot of user reviews you can use to help determine if a business is worth working with. If you run a business yourself it’s important to keep tabs on what people are saying about your business. ClientChecker is a great resource for that.