Reviews
Part of Credit bureaus compared: Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, Equifax
Credit bureaus services, seen from the other side of the report
Credit bureaus services are usually described from the wrong side. What a report on a customer can and cannot tell you, and how to pick the right product.
Almost everything written about credit bureaus services assumes you are the subject: the business being looked at, trying to look decent. That is half the table.
The other half is being the one who looks. If you give a customer terms, ship before payment, or sign a contract that depends on someone else staying solvent, you are a potential buyer of the same products for the opposite reason.
That purchase is the one most often skipped.
What to take away
- The same bureau sells you a view of yourself and a view of the people who owe you. The second is usually the better purchase and the less considered one.
- A report on a customer answers a narrow question. It cannot see cash, contracts or intent, so pair it with your own terms and your own limits.
- Read the subscriber terms before you buy. What you may do with a report, and who you may run one on, is set by the bureau's agreement with you.
Sitting on the other side
When you extend terms, you are lending. Not in the form of money handed over, but in the form of goods or work delivered against a promise to pay later, which carries the same risk and rarely gets the same scrutiny. That is the whole subject of net-30 accounts seen from the supplier's chair instead of the buyer's.
A bureau product aimed at that job typically shows how a business pays other suppliers, what public-record entries exist against it, and how long the record has been accumulating. That is a useful and limited picture.
The four bureaus you can buy from
In the United States, the business file you pull will almost always come from one of four companies. Dun & Bradstreet holds the deepest pool of business-to-business trade payment data and sells the D&B Business Information Report, the classic pay-per-look product, alongside a subscription platform sold as D&B Credit. Experian sells business credit reports and scores them with Intelliscore Plus. Equifax sells business credit reports built on its commercial payment data. TransUnion sells business credit reports of its own.
Coverage is not the same across the four. A supplier-heavy file and a bank-heavy file are different files, and a company that is thick with one bureau can be thin with another, so which report to buy depends on who the customer actually trades with. If all you need is to identify a business rather than judge it, the D-U-N-S Number Dun & Bradstreet assigns is free and is the identifier most lenders and large customers use to look a company up.
What a report on a customer cannot tell you
- Whether they have money right now. A file is a record of behavior, not a bank balance.
What a report cannot tell you
- Whether they have money right now
- Whether the new contract will be paid
- Whether a thin file means caution
- Whether the business is the one you deal with
That last one deserves a habit. Confirm the legal name, the address including any suite, and the entity type against what the customer wrote on your own paperwork before you rely on a file you pulled. The three places to compare are your customer's W-9, the business entity register kept by the secretary of state where the company is organized, and the D-U-N-S record behind the file.
Choosing the product for that job
Work out how you will actually use it before comparing anything.
Match product to your pattern
Your pattern
- A handful of large accounts
- Individual reports at decision
- Many small accounts
- Bundle or subscription
- Ongoing exposure to a few names
- Monitoring those counterparties
What suits it
- A handful of large accounts
- Many small accounts
- Ongoing exposure to a few names
| Your pattern | What suits it |
|---|---|
| A handful of large accounts | Individual reports at the point of decision, plus a review when terms change |
| Many small accounts | A bundle or a subscription, with a rule about which size of exposure triggers a pull |
| Ongoing exposure to a few names | Monitoring on those counterparties rather than repeated pulls |
Those patterns translate into named products. A single large order is a pay-per-look pull: the D&B Business Information Report, or a business credit report from Experian, Equifax, or TransUnion. A book of many smaller accounts is a subscription with alerts rather than a stack of single reports, which is what D&B Credit and the comparable bureau subscriptions are for — you pay for the seat and the monitoring, not the pull.
Where the decision is a loan, the score in play may not be a bureau score at all. FICO SBSS, the score SBA 7(a) lenders use for smaller loans, blends business and personal credit data, which is why a personal pull can legitimately belong in a business decision. Dun & Bradstreet's PAYDEX is a payment-behavior score built from trade experiences and is not a probability of default, so read it as a history, not a forecast.
Then check coverage. A bureau can only tell you about businesses its furnishers report on, so ask what happens when the customer is not in the database, and whether that costs you anything.
Price the whole pattern, not the single report. The cost anatomy is the same on this side of the desk: per-pull, per-seat, and renewal terms are where the surprises live.
The rules that apply when you buy
Consumer files and business files are not governed the same way, and confusing them is the expensive mistake on this side of the desk.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) covers consumer reports. It limits a pull to a permissible purpose — a credit transaction, employment, insurance, and a short list of others — and it gives the person named in the file rights that your business customer does not have over a business report. A file on a sole proprietor can still count as a consumer report, so the same rules can attach to a pull that looks like a business one.
A business credit report sold to a subscriber sits outside that consumer framework and is governed by the subscriber agreement instead: what you may use it for, how long you may keep it, whether you may share it, and what happens if you pull on a company you have no relationship with. That is why the contract, and not the statute, is the document to read before you buy — and why a bureau can suspend your access for a use its terms do not allow.
Being the subject, briefly
The buying questions when the file is yours are simpler, because there is only
one honest product per bureau: your own file. Each of the four sells that directly, and the consumer files held by Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion are available at no charge through AnnualCreditReport.com, the site those three set up under federal law. A Dun & Bradstreet business file is not part of that arrangement.
Questions when the file is yours
- Which bureaus does it cover by name
- Is the data live or a copy
- Whose account is it if you cancel
- Can you export what you see
A correction is raised at the bureau holding the entry, so a consolidated dashboard is a reading tool, not a repair tool.
What each bureau holds starts the choice of which bureaus you need.
Where the two sides meet
The habits are the same in both directions. Set the limit before you look, so the report informs a decision rather than justifying one you already made. Write down what you decided and why. Re-check when the relationship changes size, not on a calendar.
And apply to your own suppliers the question you would want your customers to ask you: does this account report, and to whom? That is where vendor accounts either build a record or quietly build nothing.
Extending terms to a customer is a lending decision, and it belongs inside the wider cash discipline the SBA sets out under managing your finances. For what is expected of firms offering and advertising credit to businesses, the Federal Trade Commission's credit and finance guidance is the neutral reference.
Common questions
Is it worth checking a customer if the order is small?
Set a threshold in advance, in terms of what you could afford to lose, and check above it. One pay-per-look report — the D&B Business Information Report, or a business credit report from Experian, Equifax, or TransUnion — is enough for a single decision, which is why the threshold can sit lower than you think. Deciding case by case in the moment is how the largest exposures end up being the unchecked ones.
The customer has no file at all. Do I refuse?
No. Absence is weak evidence either way. Ask for trade references you can actually call, start with terms you can afford to lose, and let the relationship earn its way up.
Should I watch my customers continuously?
Only where the exposure is ongoing and large enough that you would act on the alert. A subscription that monitors the files you care about — D&B Credit, or a bureau business report subscription with alerts — is what that looks like in practice. Otherwise it is the same trap as watching your own file constantly: information arriving faster than any decision you were going to make.
