One of the biggest differences between business credit and personal credit is how the tradelines are displayed on the credit reports. With personal credit, you may be used to seeing the full name of the creditor/vendor who reported the tradeline. With business credit, it can be a little more tricky and in this article, we will cover what to look out for when identifying a tradeline on your report(s).
What are all these tradelines on my reports?
The 3 major business credit bureaus (D&B, Experian, and Equifax) all use a system of supplier categories to label tradelines without naming them. These categories can be somewhat specific to a vendor or very broad, and they aren’t always the same between credit bureaus.
For example: Uline reports to Experian business credit reports with the category “Packaging”, and they are the only vendor that we’ve come across that uses this category, so it would be safe to assume that if you see “Packaging” on your company’s Experian report after making a purchase with them that you now have Uline reporting. Additionally, Uline uses the category “Whol Service Paper” when reporting to Dun & Bradstreet.
However, some business credit underwriters use the same category for every (if not the majority of) the accounts that they oversee. For example: Citibank underwrites several business credit accounts that they use the category “Financial Services” to report purchases under. This wouldn’t be an issue if you were approved for one of these accounts, made a purchase, then saw “financial services” report a few weeks later. But if you have more than one of these accounts going at the same time, you may need to use some of the other points in this article to differentiate them.
Not every creditor/vendor reports to all of your company’s credit reports. For example: Quill only reports to Dun & Bradstreet whereas Uline will report to both Dun & Bradstreet and Experian, so if you recently made a purchase with Quill we’d only expect to see that purchase show up on Dun & Bradstreet. We have a section on each vendor page letting you know which credit reports each of them report to.
You can also use the reported purchase amounts to identify a tradeline. Another key difference between business and personal credit is that with business credit the tradelines only report the dollar amount of what you’ve used rather than the credit limit you were approved for. For example: if you were approved for a $5,000 personal credit card and make a $50 purchase and pay it off, the tradeline that reports will show $5,000. However, if that was a business credit card, only the $50 purchase will report and the tradeline will remain at that dollar amount until you use more.
Because of this, you can use your invoices/statements to figure out who a tradeline came from. One caveat to that is that on Dun & Bradstreet, the dollar amounts will be either rounded up or rounded down.
What if I still can’t identify the tradeline?
If the tradeline still can’t be identified with the information above, the only way to get an exact answer is to draft up a dispute request to send to the bureau(s) to have it removed. If the bureau is able to verify it as accurate to your company’s credit report, they will leave the tradeline on the report and email you the name of the vendor. We don’t normally advise doing this if the tradeline is reporting all positive payments experiences, because when you submit a dispute request, the bureau will reach out to the creditor/vendor to verify the information they reported to your credit report is accurate. The bureaus give them a limited amount of time to reply, which most of the time they don’t, and they will remove the tradeline from them report if they don’t get a response in that timeframe, which is not what we want if the tradeline is benefiting the company’s credit report(s).
