Great Tool for Evaluating Credit Worthiness
April 15, 2024
Great Tool for Evaluating Credit Worthiness
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with D&B Finance Analytics
We are a podcast ad agency specialist and podcast advertising is a very popular way to advertise products and services. We get quite a few companies coming to us who need help to try to be on the right shows to reach their target audience. When they come to us, we consider it a business relationship and there's many parts of that relationship, but one of them, of course is setting up a payment process. One of the questions that comes up in that context is "should we offer them credit terms or should we require cash in advance?" It's hard to know whether the company is credit worthy. You can't necessarily judge a company's credit worthiness based on how big they are or how well known they are. After all, being small isn't necessarily a bad thing and being large isn't necessarily a good thing.
The worst decision is when you're doing it on a hunch or on the personality of the applicant. What we do is we use, and I particularly use the D&B Finance Analytics tool to take all the emotion out of it. It takes all the guesswork out of the decision about whether to offer them credit. It's purely factual. It gives us a simple number between zero and 10, and our number is 6.5. It pulls together a number of different variables that allow us, and it allows us to weigh those variables in terms of importance. Those variables include how quickly they pay their bills, their pay ex record, any liens or judgments, delinquency scores, any news about them, financials if they're available. Then it comes up with this custom score. It's very objective and I can just decide they are above that number or they're below that number and make the decision accordingly.
The worst decision is when you're doing it on a hunch or on the personality of the applicant. What we do is we use, and I particularly use the D&B Finance Analytics tool to take all the emotion out of it. It takes all the guesswork out of the decision about whether to offer them credit. It's purely factual. It gives us a simple number between zero and 10, and our number is 6.5. It pulls together a number of different variables that allow us, and it allows us to weigh those variables in terms of importance. Those variables include how quickly they pay their bills, their pay ex record, any liens or judgments, delinquency scores, any news about them, financials if they're available. Then it comes up with this custom score. It's very objective and I can just decide they are above that number or they're below that number and make the decision accordingly.
Pros
- Custom Scores
- Finding Companies through Search or Advanced Search. It's got an easy search bar. And then for example, we have companies all over the world that come to us. And so we can just choose the country, for example, and then write the name in there and it'll bring up a lot of different companies that maybe are exactly that name or close to that name. And when we see what we believe to be the actual company, we can click on it and then know whether they are credit worthy.
- Great UX on the website - fast and easy to use. The speed with which it operates is really terrific and very important for us because we usually have to make that decision right away.
- Using something as objective as a numerical score simplifies decisions about offering credit. We have to make a decision usually on whether to offer credit to an advertiser quickly. So what's wonderful about the process is that we don't have to be searching around on Google or any kind of review site and then try to discern whether they're credit worthy. We simply open up the D&B Finance Analytics tool.
Cons
- There are several steps required before getting to the custom score - it would be nice to have a shortcut to that feature
- Makes decision-making about offering credit fact-based rather than emotional
- I would say that it has been non-quantifiable by itself because there are a number of factors that go into the return on investment to acquiring a customer, retaining a customer, and growing a customer's business. But it's really a crucial piece.
- What I have found is that when we make a decision based on the factual information we get through D&B Finance Analytics, it turns out that it works out well in terms of predicting the success of a company to be able to pay. We have not had a single situation where we, let's say, granted credit to a company and then they didn't proceed to pay on a timely basis. The flip side is also important. I had a situation about a year ago where a company came to us wanting to do podcast advertising and I just had a hunch that it sounded a little fishy and they were pushing very hard to get credit terms and that was just very important. They brought that up right away and the kind of business that they were, it just seemed to me like maybe they weren't all that solid. We went to D&B Finance Analytics as I always do, and I went and I found out that they had a horrible score and I said, "I'm really sorry, this is going to have to be a cash in advance buy, we use D&B Finance Analytics." I stated that and he was really upset and he shouted at me, and I'll never forget this call, and he said, "I don't know why you're making that decision," and so forth and so on. I just held my ground and I said, "Well, it's what D&B Finance Analytics pulls from various databases, and it's the facts. So that's our decision is we only go by that number. We don't make any exceptions." We never did business with that company. I'm really glad. So in addition to knowing that a company's record is what D&B Finance Analytics says it's going to be on the positive side, it can also help to avoid mistakes on the other side.
I have to say that in terms of what we use D&B Finance Analytics for, I have not tried to find another company because it works perfectly for what we need. If there's research that we need to do on a company that's broader than let's say their payment records, we have other software and other research that we do. For example, we subscribe to certain databases for podcast advertisers to find out their history and if they've been on other shows and so forth and so on. There are industry-specific databases that we do subscribe to, but the D&B Finance Analytics database for the purpose of judging a company's credit worthiness is unmatched in my view.
Do you think D&B Finance Analytics delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with D&B Finance Analytics's feature set?
Yes
Did D&B Finance Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of D&B Finance Analytics go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy D&B Finance Analytics again?
Yes
Comments
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