A business credit bureau is an agency that collects and researches data on businesses and sells it for a fee to lenders and credit issuers to make lending decisions. It may also be called a commercial business credit reporting agency, or a corporate credit bureau.

You may be wondering: do business credit inquiries hurt my credit? Unlike with personal credit, anyone can pull your business credit reports. This does result in inquiries.

However, unlike with personal credit, business credit inquiries don’t negatively affect your Fundability or business credit scores with each business credit bureau.

Establishing business tradelines is the act of applying to and using accounts that report to the business credit bureaus.

A business credit profile is all the information included on all your business credit reports including all your business tradelines, business information, and business credit scores. Building your business credit profile means to improve accuracy and accumulate positive experiences and information which present your business in a favorable light.

A personal guarantee is an individual’s legal promise to repay credit issued to a business where they are an owner, executive, or a partner.

With business credit agreements, giving a personal guarantee essentially makes you a co-signer on the business credit account. You will remain liable for any debts the business incurs. You have given a “personal guarantee” that you will be responsible for the debt.

In practice, this means that your personal credit will undergo a hard inquiry, since you are putting your Social Security number on the credit application. With enough hard inquiries, your personal credit score will be adversely affected.

Business tradelines are vendor accounts reported by the vendor to a business credit bureau. This information is included in a specific location in a business credit report.

When a businesses’ payment activity in relation to a new or continuously reported tradeline is recorded by a business credit bureau.

When a lending institution has more than just your personal credit scores to look at, they will review any other information which they believe will better answer their one big question: will you pay them back?

Because it’s possible to have good business credit with bad credit on the personal side. But if your business credit is good enough for a lender, they will weigh it more heavily in their decision.

Lending institutions will let your business credit guide them as they pull your business credit reports and look for a few things.

• Do you pay your bills on time?
• Are there a lot of negative/derogatory items on your credit reports, such as lawsuits or liens?
• How long have you been in business?
• Is the business credible?
• Does the information on the business credit report match the information received on the application?

If the answers to these questions satisfy the lending institution, then you’re more likely to get a loan, although it will not necessarily be for exactly the amount you were originally seeking.