Just like a personal credit report there is also a business credit report for your business. There is plenty of free access to the credit report for your business which can provide you with important information you can use to make vital business decisions.
An accurate report can help you to decide whether or not you want to do business with a certain company and possibly what price you can charge. You can access comprehensive financial information that will allow you to assess the level of risk there is in extending credit to other companies.
You will also be able to investigate credit risk factors to help avoid unforeseen surprises when reviewing current customers for credit increases and learn what to expect through review of a company’s historical business practices.
Having access to an objective business credit report can help determine how confidently you can make a decision on credit for a new customer or if you need to learn more about them before you extend credit terms to them.
Through UCC, or the Uniform Commercial Code, filings you can figure out what your creditor position is in relation to other creditors that may already be in line for collection on any given credit customer of yours.
If you dedicatedly monitor your business credit, you can always have access to the information available to you regarding how much credit your suppliers will extend to you, the interest you will pay, how much you can borrow from a lender, what your customers think about you, and how interested potential investors may be.
With the ability to monitor other companies’ credit reports, you can get a leg up by discovering past payment practices of prospective customers, your current client’s business conditions, supplier’s history with other businesses, what competitors are doing, and other business details that you deem important.
You need the ease, affordability, and convenience of being able to monitor your own and your competitors credit status and receive updates right to your email. Important information about the stability of a company is sound or if they are planning to go out of business. You should also know if they begin to get behind on payments or if your own credit report remains accurate; so you can maintain a positive cash flow environment.
Having free access to all this data is the key and can mean the difference between your business success or business failure and keep you out of trouble. I have a friend who owned a business several years ago and if she had had access to all this information she probably would still be in business today. She didn’t have this kind of access to other’s information and got seriously taken advantage of by more than one supplier and then discovered she had no legal recourse to do anything about it.
If she had had access to objective, accurate business credit report information, she would not have ended up filing for bankruptcy and spending the better part of the next decade digging herself out from under a pile of legal BS she had to deal with.