Improve your business credit score with company credit checks and monitoring

CreditFocus is one of the best tools to carry out company credit checks on the market. It’s never been easier to check and improve your own business credit score.

What a good credit check looks like for your company

With CreditFocus’ traffic light colour system, its easy to identify when your business has a good credit score, your payment indicator score and credit indicator score will all be highlighted green. Let’s take a look in more detail what makes a good company credit check:

• Low payment indicator score: You pay your bills on time or early
• Good payment performance rating: Overall summary of your payment performance rating
• Low historic payment performance score: Your previous payments have been made early or on time
• High credit indicator score: You’re likely to make credit payments
• Low risk rating: Overall risk summary of how likely or unlikely you are to make credit payments
• No CCJs credit events: You have no CCJ’s filled against your business
• Full busines information: All your business information has been recorded by CRAs

What a bad credit check looks like

On the other end of the scale, if your business’s credit score is bad, you will be able to clearly see this as your credit indicator and payment indicator score will be highlighted red:

• High payment indicator score: You make payments over 60 days late
• Poor payment performance rating: Overall summary of your payment performance rating
• High historic payment performance score: You have a history of making payments over 60 days late
• Low credit indicator score: You’re unlikely to make credit payments
• High risk rating: Overall risk summary of how likely or unlikely you are to make credit payments
• CCJs in your credit events: You have CCJ’s filled against your business
• Missing busines information: All your business information hasn’t been shared with CRAs

You can easily check your own business credit score with CreditFocus. Click here to sign up today and find out what your business credit score is and identify how you can improve it to get better rates from lenders and suppliers!

How you can improve your credit score

Once you know your business credit score and have identified what needs improving as discussed above in the ‘What a bad credit check looks like’ section, you then need to take action. Here are some ways you can improve your overall business credit score:

• File your accounts, company tax return or corporation tax with HMRC and Companies House at the end of the financial year on time
• Pay bills on time
• Avoid CCJs at all costs
• Share your company information so CRAs can record and validate your business data
• Update Companies house with any changes made to your business as soon as possible
• Make sure your personal finances are healthy
• Only submit applications for finance when necessary, several applications will have a negative effect on your business credit score
• Regularly check your business credit score and keep track of it

Keeping track of your business credit score

When you sign up to CreditFocus, you will have access to your credit monitoring watchlist. Here you add businesses to your watchlist which is automatically updated daily with the most recent and accurate credit data.

You can access a business’s credit data (in this case your own business) through this watchlist without having to run another company credit check. You’ll also get notifications if the business credit status significantly changes – so as you go about your day to day business, you can easily keep track of what business activities are having a positive or negative effect on your business credit score in just a few clicks!

Remember, company credit checks and monitoring can be used for much more than improving your own business credit score, take a look at this article to see how else these tools can be used to effectively protect your business