How to Read Dun & Bradstreet Business Credit Reports

Snapshot with address, incorporation information, industry classification, and ownership. This section provides an overview of a business’s size and scope, how it’s organized, and how it’s been managed.

Here, you’ll find some of the most in-depth and beneficial intelligence for assessing risk and making business credit decisions. The Risk Assessment contains Dun & Bradstreet’s robust, proprietary, and reliable business credit scores and ratings, such as:

• D&B Viability Rating^® — A highly reliable and multidimensional credit rating system that holistically evaluates a company’s current and future health and forecasts what the next year may look like – specifically the probability that the firm will go out of business, become inactive, or go bankrupt.

•  D&B Failure Score — Predicts the likelihood that the company will seek legal relief from creditors in the next year or cease operations and leave creditors on the hook. The score (on a scale of 1 to 100) is based on a company’s business history, payment habits, and industry norms.

• D&B Delinquency Predictor Score — Another predictive credit score that looks ahead at the next 12 months and (based on invoice payments) rates the business on the likelihood of it making severely delinquent payments, seeking legal relief from creditors, or ceasing operations without paying creditors.

• D&B PAYDEX^® — A payment index, if you will — a unique, dollar-weighted assessment of the business’s credit history and payment performance over the past two years. These credit insights are based on trade experiences reported by vendors; it differs from the D&B Delinquency Predictor Score in that it only considers past payment performance.

Dun & Bradstreet has the world’s largest commercial trade data network, with tens of thousands of companies around the world providing monthly accounts receivable (A/R) data through the Global Trade Exchange Program. Trade payments provide valuable insight to credit professionals because these records of payment behavior offer objective evidence of how the company has paid other partners; they can be the most critical pieces of information the credit professional can have. Dun & Bradstreet collects trade data from more than 700 different lines of business, and some 99.5 percent of all trade in the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud comes from companies and independent third parties — no self-references or trade from inside the corporate family.

Understanding legal activity – bankruptcies, lawsuits, liens, judgments, and other public filings — is also crucial in identifying credit risk. Dun & Bradstreet collects business-related bankruptcy information from every bankruptcy court in the US, and each bankruptcy is investigated and confirmed by an analyst before being posted to a business credit report. Also, Dun & Bradstreet is one of the few providers to feature lawsuits in its commercial credit reports.

With more than 450 million records in the Data Cloud, Dun & Bradstreet’s corporate family trees provide a comprehensive view of the relationship between companies and their majority-owned subsidiaries and branch locations. Seeing a visual representation of a corporation’s different businesses and locations can help you assess a company’s size, understand its real estate footprint, identify potential conflicts of interest​s​, and create more accurate reporting on large suppliers. Understanding company relationships and business hierarchy helps to better identify credit risk hotspots to ensure you can properly evaluate credit limits, prioritize collections, and recognize growth opportunities.