October 27th, 2009 by Alex Coté
Last week I received an email from a customer asking a simple question.
“How do we go about contributing credit information about companies? If we run into problems with a customer, we would want the market to know what problems with payment we had.”
The standard and historic answer that most credit bureaus like Cortera would give is this:
“Please send us a cut of your monthly accounts receivables information according to our standard format and we’ll incorporate it into our database.”
This is the way it has always been. Sounds simple enough – right? Well, it is not. For most companies this task requires some kind of technical expertise to get that information out of their accounting system and into a format that a bureau can ingest and then report back on a credit report. Plus, this can take weeks by the time the request has been made to IT and then the information actually shows up on a credit report. In the mean time the debtor could continue to be granted credit without the greater market having any knowledge of their payment problems. Obviously we are talking about reporting on customers that are well past due and are not likely to be a customer again – in common terms we are talking about deadbeats.
Of course my answer is different now.
My response back:
“We just launched a new free website that makes reporting on a specific company and telling the market about them very easy. You can go to Cortera’s community ratings website and from there you can search for the business that is giving you trouble and use the “Rate Company” tab to provide your payment experience and comments.”
Within 5 minutes he was able to report on the two customers that were giving him trouble.
Have a few customer (or should I say ex-customer) deadbeats in your portfolio? Tell the world about yours and who knows you must just catch one reported by another member before you get in too deep.
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