Adding Payments to Your Business Experian Credit Report

Did you know you can now add positive payment history to your Business Experian credit report? Much like the D&B process of submitting your vendors and suppliers for verification, Business Experian now allows their Business Advantage Report subscribers to submit their creditors for verification and inclusion to the corporate credit profile. What's nice is that we can now take care of that vendor submission process for you. And even better? It's included in our existing Powerboost service!

Adding positive payment history to the business credit report is a crucial step in building or boosting your corporate credit scores and ratings. This is especially important if you are a small business who tends to use small or local vendors and suppliers who aren't auto-reporters to the major commercial credit bureaus.

But adding payment history has an added benefit that most small business owners aren't aware of — the boost to your company's scores and ratings in the Small Business Financial Exchange (SBFE).

For those who aren't familiar with SBFE, it is an industry-based trade association comprised of over 135 U.S. small business lenders, including many of the largest banks, financial organizations and credit card issuers. Lenders who report to SBFE are also able to view credit information that has been input into the system by other lenders and commercial credit bureaus.

If you submit a credit card or loan application, it is very likely that creditor is going to pull your company's SBFE report. If there's no information in SBFE, they will pull your report from one of the other commercial credit bureaus. But if they can see that you've already received credit from one of the other preferred lenders in their system and are managing that credit well, they are more likely to approve your application because they know someone else has already done their due diligence and trusted your company with credit, and they want a piece of that!

One of the biggest differences between submitting vendors to D&B and submitting them to Business Experian is that D&B typically blocks the ability to submit many of your existing vendors and suppliers if they are:

• Banks

• Credit cards

• Insurance

• Utilities

• Large corporations

• Companies who are auto-reporters

• Companies on D&B's "do not call" list

• Companies who have declined to report to D&B in the past

• Companies that don't have a full D&B credit profile of their own

This can be very frustrating for small business owners and may significantly reduce the number of payment experiences that can actually be submitted, limiting what might have been the biggest benefit to their company's credit scores and ratings.

But we can now submit all of those vendors, suppliers and creditors to Business Experian for verification for you. Whether Experian accepts them or adds those payments is out of our control, but we've seen pretty good results so far. It takes a little longer to see those payments show up in the credit report, sometimes 45 to 60 days, but we track the changes to the credit profile and can alert you to any changes as we see them.

This can be a huge improvement for business owners who have had difficulty adding payment history to their D&B report, and specifically if those creditors fall into any of the categories listed above. More importantly, it's also an easy and legitimate option for improving your company's SBFE scores and ratings that you may not have known about in the past.

THE PROCESS

When you sign up for services with Starpoint Credit Solutions, you will be sent three "welcome" emails. One of those emails will include a request for your existing vendors, suppliers and creditors, and it will include a link to a shared spreadsheet where you can securely input your information. I will vet the companies on your list to see which will be most beneficial for your business credit report. When my internal vetting process is complete, we'll submit those creditors to Business Experian through your Business Advantage report, and then we'll track the changes and alert you as those payments get added to your file.

Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions or would like to get signed up for services today.