Meredith Wood — December 12, 2017 — December 12, 2017
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If there’s one thing you’ve learned as a business owner—or even as a functional adult—it’s that your credit score follows you everywhere.
Just like your personal credit score measures your personal creditworthiness—determining your ability to qualify to purchase a home or car—your business credit score represents your company’s creditworthiness.
A strong business credit score can increase your chances of securing a favorable business loan or good rates on an insurance policy, among other things.
And if you’ve ever opened a business credit card, then you have a business credit score.
There are many reasons it pays to have a high business credit score—it’s just up to you to stay on top of it. But how?
Understanding The Business Credit Score Scale
Before we dive into the details of how to check your business credit score for free, let’s quickly go over what to expect.
While the factors that determine a business credit score are similar to those for a personal credit score, the scores themselves are wildly different.
Personal credit scores range from 350 to 800, while business credit bureaus (Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, and Equifax) use different scales.
Dun & Bradstreet and Experian use a scale of 0-100 whereas Equifax offers three different assessments for businesses: the payment index (scores range from 0-100), the credit risk score (scores range from 101-992) and the business failure score (ranging from 1,000-1,610).
Now that you know what the number on your business credit score means, here are 5 different ways you can check your business credit score for free.
Nav is a service for both consumers and business owners to monitor their credit. You don’t need a credit card to sign up, and it’s a great place to get a free summary of your business credit reports from both Dun & Bradstreet and Experian. This is especially great because you don’t have to go two different places to get these two different scores.
If you wish to move beyond the summaries and get full credit reports, you’ll have to pay for Nav’s services. But getting access to your scores is an excellent place to start monitoring your business credit. Nav’s tools also help you set goals to improve your business credit score and provide easy error disputing.
Dun & Bradstreet offers a free business credit reporting service called CreditSignal.
CreditSignal’s major benefit is its easy system for monitoring your business credit. After signing up, you can choose to monitor changes to your score and view when someone has requested your score through the online dashboard, mobile app, or even email alerts.
CreditSignal also offers tons of educational resources. You can receive advice to improve your score based on your credit history or even learn specific information about your industry in regards to credit.
Of course, these features are free, but you will have to pay for detailed credit reporting. The paid subscription to CreditSignal’s monitoring service allows you to view your actual score, rating, and who is viewing your credit information.
Credit.net is another paid service to monitor your business credit. There are a few different packages, so you can select the best option for you in terms of price and functionality.
You don’t have to have a credit card to sign up, however, and you can get a free 7-day trial of reporting services, as well as 7 free business credit reports. Those free reports could prove invaluable, especially if you’re just now starting to monitor your business credit.
Since you won’t have a credit card on file, you won’t end up unintentionally paying for a service you don’t use. However, you may find that it’s more worth it to start paying to monitor your credit now rather than waiting and having something go wrong in the future, making you wish you’d done so.
Like Credit.net, Scorely offers a free credit report demo, and then an optional paid service for credit monitoring and full reporting.
What sets Scorely apart is that it is actually considered a business credit reporting bureau, and a transparent one at that. It provides understandable credit reports by aggregating data.
Scorely is one of the best options for business owners who aren’t familiar with credit reporting, thanks to its easy-to-read display of data and reporting. It also provides actionable tips to help you improve your business credit score and take control of your business’ future.
Finally, CreditSafe.com is—you guessed it—another business credit monitoring service. You may opt-in for a paid subscription, but you can also simply get started with a free business credit report.
This service provides many credit monitoring tools, including syncing your financial data, your payment trends, risk rating, days beyond terms, and much more.
There are three packages depending on the needs of your business: Standard, Plus, and Premier. After acquiring your free report, one of CreditSafe’s risk consultants will be able to provide you a quote based on your business’ needs.
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It doesn’t matter which tool you ultimately decide to use—it just matters that you use one. Getting on top of your business credit score can do wonders for the future of your business, especially if you do so early. There are many opportunities coming your way, and you owe yourself the ability to grab onto them when you can.
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