How Do You Effectively Monitor Your Business Credit Report?

It’s vital to effectively monitor your business credit report.

It’s imperative that as a business owner that you keep a close eye on all the content that shows up your business report. The reason for monitoring your business credit report is that your business credit report matters! It directly impacts the financial and funding ability of your company. It doesn’t only affect a small portion of your business. But it will affect the financing costs, credit terms, interest rates, insurance premiums, and credit limits. Plus, so much more in your business.

Keeping up to date and monitoring your business credit report is helpful. It makes it easier to see all the factors that are affecting your report and scores. Every day, information on your business credit scores changes. There are constant changes to transactions and outstanding balances. And it shows if you pay invoices on time. With all these changes, you want to be able to know what’s currently on your business credit report.

Stay Up to Date

It’s good to have access to your business credit profile. Because this is where you can see all the ongoing transitions on your company’s credit file.

For example, let’s say that you recently paid off an outstanding invoice. Here, it would a better to wait until you see if your business credit report reflects the payment on the invoice. In order to maintain and stay updated on your business credit report, you’ll need to subscribe to business credit monitoring service. That will help you monitor all the activity on your business credit report.

A Monitoring Service Can Help

Having a credit monitoring service to protect your company’s credit information, is something that most business owners need. There’s growing number of businesses that face business identity theft. According to Dun & Bradstreet, there’s a disturbing trend of business losing up to six figures due to criminal activity. Constantly monitoring your business credit report gives you the ability to see if there are any criminal activity happening. This can affect your scores, filings, and newly opened accounts associated with your company.

Why Do You Want to Monitor Business Credit Reports?

Once your business credit report is up to date, business credit agencies final decisions will impact:

• How much credit a supplier will lend to you.
• It will affect your interest rates, and whether you will pay high-interest rates. And it will affect the terms and conditions for loans and credit cards.
• It will determine what your insurance premiums will be for the year.
• How potential investors will view your company.

The three major credit bureaus that you want to use to monitor your business credit is Dun & Bradstreet, Experian Business and Equifax Small Business.

Dun & Bradstreet Business

D&B monitors changes in your credit scores and ratings. To help ensure that your up-to-date with business credit information D&B anticipates all possible reactions from current partners and lenders, and they track how many times your business credit report is being used. You can get alerts when your company’s credit scores and ratings change. Get alerts when others have made purchases on your business credit file. So this allows you to have valuable insight to help protect your business.

Experian Business

Experian will monitor and send alerts when changes in your business credit file have changed. And they will help you keep track of your business credit score. You’ll also be able to screen other businesses to get background information. So this is including liens, judgments, and bankruptcies. That way, as a business owner you can avoid making a bad decision. You won’t try to work with companies that don’t use good financial judgment. Also, you can get online and access your business report instantly through Experian.

Equifax Small Business

Equifax monitors your credit activity of all your business customers, partners and suppliers. You can choose to set up the Business Credit monitor alert. So this is where you can get alerts for any bankruptcy events reported.

And you can get derogatory alerts including judgments, liens, delinquencies, and charge-offs. Get these as well as delinquent amounts greater than or equal to 60 days past due. You can also get an alert when your Equifax score drops 20 points or more.

How to Effectively Monitor Your Business Credit Report

Monitoring your business credit report can seem hard and time-consuming, but there are so many new tools that Experian, Equifax and Dun & Bradstreet provides you with so that it’s easy for you to receive updates, alerts and information when there’s a change to your business report. It’s important that you stay updated with all the information reported on your business credit report. Everything that’s reported on your business credit report can either impact your business in a positive or a negative way. If you haven’t signed up for alerts, then do so!