Rules
Part of Where real tradelines actually come from, and where they do not
Running five passes over the tradelines you already hold
Tradelines review: five passes over the set of accounts you already hold, how to decide what to close, and what to write down before next year.
A review is not the same activity as building. Building asks what to open. Reviewing asks what the set you already have is doing, and whether any of it is still earning its place.
Once a year is enough for most businesses, plus a short version after anything structural.
What to take away
- Review the set, not the accounts one at a time. An account that looks fine alone can be the reason another one is redundant.
- Two thirds of a good review is confirming that what you believe is on your files is actually on them.
- Close things carefully. A closure changes the record, and not always the way you expect.
What to have in front of you
Your own log of accounts, if you kept one from the
What to have in front of you
- Your own log of accounts
- Current files from each bureau, same day
- Written answers on who reports where
- Nothing else, no vendor summary
tradelines checklist. Your current files pulled directly from each bureau on the same day. The written answers you collected about who reports where. Nothing else, and specifically not a vendor's summary of your file.
Pull the files first and read them before you look at your own log, so the log does not tell you what to see.
The five passes
Pass one: presence. For each account you believe reports, is it there? An
The five passes
- Presenceis each account in the file?
- Identitydoes the business appear once?
- Accuracydoes each entry describe what happened?
- Usefulnessstill used, reporting, worth the cost?
- Exposurewhat have you personally guaranteed?
Pass two: identity. Does the business appear once, or more than once? Look for near-variants of your own name and address. This is the single highest-value thing in the review, because a fragment holds history you cannot point at.
Pass three: accuracy. For entries that are present, does each one describe what happened? You are looking for balances that never existed, statuses that do not match your records, and entries belonging to somebody else. Wrong is a different problem from missing, and it goes down the route in business credit disputes.
Pass four: usefulness. For each account: do you still use it, does it still report, and does it still cost less than what it does for you? An account that has stopped being used is contributing very little and may be costing a fee.
Pass five: exposure. For each account, what have you personally guaranteed, and does the total still make sense? Facilities accumulate quietly. This pass often matters more than the other four combined.
Deciding what to close
Closing is the part people get wrong in both directions. Some close everything
dormant and lose the older records they were relying on. Some close nothing and carry fees and exposure for years.
A workable order of questions:
- Is there a cost to keeping it? A fee, an exposure, an access risk.
- Does it currently report anything a reader of the file would find informative?
- Would closing it remove the only record of a relationship of that length?
- Can the same purchasing be routed somewhere that already reports?
If it costs nothing, reports something, and is your longest relationship, leave it. If it costs something and reports nothing, it is a supplier account rather than a credit-building one, and it should be judged purely as a supplier.
How long a closed account remains visible is set by the bureau and by the type of entry. The CFPB explains how long information stays on a credit report on the consumer side; the business side is not the same rulebook, and the honest answer for a given entry is to ask the bureau holding it.
After the review
Write four lines: what you confirmed, what you corrected, what you closed and why, and what you will look at next time. Date it. This is what makes the next review take an hour instead of a day.
If the review turned up something you want to watch more closely than once a year, that is a monitoring decision rather than a review decision, and credit monitoring covers whether it is worth paying for. If it turned up a set of accounts that no longer suits how the business buys, the mechanisms are laid out in tradelines comparison.
For a broader annual look at the business's finances that this review fits inside, the SBA's material on managing your finances is a reasonable frame. Where you want a person rather than a page, the SBA also funds small business development centers that give free advice and have no product to sell you.
Common questions
How long does this take the first time?
Longer than you expect, mostly because pulling files from several bureaus and reading them properly is slow. Budget most of a day. The second year is an hour if you wrote the four lines.
Should I review after every new account?
No. Confirm the new account appeared, which is one check, and leave the full review annual. Doing it more often produces the same findings and less action.
What if the review finds nothing wrong?
That is the common outcome and it is worth the day anyway, because the value is in confirming rather than in finding. Write it down and move on.
