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BUSINESS BASICS CHANNELS 
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Business
Smarts: When you are considering a new business relationship, you can put your business at risk financially and legally if you make the wrong choice. Unfortunately, you don’t always get the information you need by asking for information directly. What are the basics that will help you decide if you can rely on your new business relationship before you begin? You can ask for an account verification at their bank. When you ask for account verification at a bank, you will need specific written permission from the account owner. The bank can then give you information such as the day that they opened the account and the balance in the account. You will need to ask for written permission for each account if you are interested in receiving total information from the bank. Your request to the bank should be written, enclosing the authorization of the account owner. If you wish more information before doing business with a company, you may want to check them out at Dun & Bradstreet. Dun & Bradstreet is number one globally in providing information about “business-to-business credit, marketing, purchasing and receivables management and decision support services.” You can find Dun & Bradstreet on the Web at http://www.dnb.com/. Dun and Bradstreet has been established for more than 150 years. Far from being behind-the-times dinosaurs, though, they’re right in front of information technology. They make more than 300 million updates to their information systems on a yearly basis. This can be important when they’re updating payment and banking experiences (almost 892,000 a day), bankruptcies (205 a day; 75,000 per year), lawsuits, liens, judgments, new business registrations (more than 17 million a year!) They state that they can have up to 1,500 data elements on any specific company, drawn from a wide variety of official and media sources. Key to Dun’s usefulness is that they collect information on both public and private companies, and they connect corporate families so that you can see relationships when you purchase their information. Dun’s database includes more than 57 million companies in over 200 countries. Financial information that you can purchase from Duns’ includes: The D&B Business Background Report. This is a short business summary that includes the company’s name and address, parent company, sales volume, net worth, number of employees and line of business. It will alert you to any recent material changes that would impact the company’s ability to do business. Usually, you’ll be able to find out what kind of a company it is, some information about the management’s education and career history and company relationships—partners, affiliates, subsidiaries, branches. This report may also give you information about divisions, their number of employees and number of accounts. This is the relatively inexpensive “quick look” at a business. A top-of-the-line, except for individual investigation, D & B Comprehensive report can help you identify if the company is a slow pay, who the owners are and what they’ve done, whether there are any civil cases pending against the company in court. This can help you to determine how safe your business is likely to be “doing business” with a new potential supplier, partner or customer. A Duns Report can be a valuable aid to making decisions, but you need to use your own judgment in determining how seriously to take a negative mention in a report. Contract disputes and inaccurate billing can lead to slow pays on some accounts, which can be cleared up as soon as both sides give it their attention. Bankruptcies may be bad news but they also may give you a blueprint for how to get paid if a company is in a court-ordered receivership. Pay attention and minimize your financial risk. -Cynthia Nemeth-Johannes |
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