Credit Score 101: A Business Owner's Essential Guide

Discovering how to check your business credit score can be a tricky business. Your personal score has never been easier to access with regular offers from companies offering free checks on your financial health. You can easily access an annual free credit report from the credit bureaus using annualcredit.com, and contact Experian, TransUnion, or Equifax for their individual reports on your personal score. But how do you check a business credit score?

If you need a business credit score check, there are both free and paid services. However, if you want a full and detailed picture of your business score, then you should be prepared to pay for the best options.

Why Do You Need a Business Credit Score Check?

There are a variety of reasons to learn how to check your business credit score. One of the prime reasons is that your potential clients, partners, or suppliers will also be able to do so! Your business credit score is public information, so you need to know what financial information is being presented about your company.

Keeping track of your score will also help you to quickly identify and rectify errors that may be lowering your financial status. Your credit score will affect many areas of your business including your ability to secure loans essential for your business growth or inventory purchases. So, this is information every business owner needs to know and check regularly.

What is a Business Credit Score?

Your business credit score allows potential lenders to judge the credit health of your company before extending any lines of credit. As with your personal credit score, the higher the score, the better access you’ll have to loans, lower interest rates, and favorable terms for your company.

If you are just starting out as a business owner, obviously you won’t have a score yet. In order to start building one, you need to apply for a business credit card or secure a business loan from a lender who reports to the business credit bureaus.

There are three major business credit bureaus which will gather data and calculate your credit score. These are Equifax Small Business, Experian Business, and Dun & Bradstreet.

How to Check a Business Credit Score?

When looking into how to check your business credit score, you have several options. Different services offer different packages. From free basic services which give minimal information to paid services which give you all the information you need to keep a detailed check on your company’s financial health.

Dun & Bradstreet.

You can access a free business credit score service through Dun & Bradstreet. This service will send you an alert whenever your credit reports or scores change. However, you will not be able to access the full reports using this option.

This basic level of information will show you four of your business credit scores for 2 weeks. After that point, you’ll only be notified if your scores change in either direction. So, identifying why your score has lowered can be a difficult task.

So, in order to access detailed and actionable information when you check a business credit score, you will need to upgrade to a paid solution.

Nav Business Credit Score Check

Using the Nav credit monitoring service, you will be able to access free summaries of your Equifax and Experian Intelliscore with a free account. This service will provide you with summary reports, your personal Experian credit score, and your business credit grades.

As with the Dun & Bradstreet service, you will only be offered summaries or alerts without detailed information for a business credit score check.

Tillful Business Credit Check

Tillfull offers another free way to check your business credit score according to their assessment. When you apply for a company credit card or loan, then the bank will pull the information from Experian, D&B, and Equifax when assessing your application. However, this is not the same score as those issued by the business credit bureaus and is a separate score.

Lenders and suppliers are unlikely to be accessing this score when assessing the financial health of your organization.

Where Can You Get a Detailed Business Credit Score Check?

So, how do you go about getting the information you need to monitor your business credit score? Well, here are some of your best options:

• Nav Business Boost Plan - $49.99 each month
• Experian Business Credit Report - $189 annually for unlimited reports (or $39.95 per individual report.)
• Dun & Bradstreet CreditSignal Plus is $15 a month and their unlimited CreditMonitor service is $39 per month.

These services will provide you with the tools to check a business score in detail and take action to improve your rating if necessary.

What Information is Included in a Business Credit Score?

As with your personal credit score, your business credit score report will show information about your credit repayments and company debts. It will also show information about tax liens and bankruptcies related to your business. Here is the information you can expect to access when you check a business credit score report:

• Business Credit Details including outstanding balances, trade experience, and credit utilization.
• Business Demographic Details such as your company size, years on record, and company standard industrial classification codes.
• Public Records Related to Your Company including tax liens, bankruptcies, and judgments against the company.

You Can Check a Business Credit Score

This information helps business credit bureaus to calculate your company credit score. The number range can vary according to which service you use. For example, Experian’s and D&B’s scores will be between 1 and 100 whereas Equifax calculates a score between 101 and 992. This differs from personal scores which fall in the range of 300 to 850 points.

As with your personal credit score, the higher your score is in each rating the more credit-worthy your company is in the eyes of lenders.

How to Check Your Business Credit Score and Improve It

So, once you get your business credit score checked, how do you go about improving a low score? Well, as with your personal rating, you can start to improve your score using a variety of methods. These include:

• Improving your credit utilization rate.
• Paying off balances.
• Make sure to pay your current bills on time.
• Opening new lines of credit and applying for new cards (and paying these off on time!)

Change won’t be instantaneous and some marks against your company will remain on record for years (such as bankruptcies, tax liens, and judgments. But other information such as lasing and trade data will be covered by reports dating back to 36 months. The sooner you take steps to improve your credit health, the sooner your score will rise.

Takeaway - How to check your business credit score.

Learning how to check your business credit score is an essential part of maintaining your company’s financial health. To make sure you can access credit lines, cards, and favorable interest rates when you need them – your score needs to be optimized. You must identify issues quickly and act quickly if required.

To access the highest level of actionable data, you will probably need to pay for a business credit score check service. The services from business credit bureaus and services we have highlighted above will help you to keep a reliable and detailed impression of your business credit status.