Are you a small business owner or do you know one? At FinovateSpring 2012 this morning, we announced BusinessIQ Express, an exciting online tool designed to help small businesses keep the cash flowing by helping them make smarter decisions about the businesses they work with. The tool helps users:

• Evaluate prospects, customers, suppliers and partners on their likelihood to pay on time
• Monitor business relationships via alerts and notifications of key changes
• Collect on outstanding debts and avoid future losses

In addition, it houses a library of tutorial videos and educational information including whitepapers as well as live customer service – everything a small business needs to make informed, insightful decisions. 

BusinessIQ Express is a complete package for one compelling price! (There’s even an option to user limited services as a free member.)

The kids are back to school. Now it’s time for you to get back to business and focus on building what’s best for growing your small business, including a good business credit rating. 

Remember, your company’s business credit information is one of the first things lenders, suppliers and others will look at before deciding to do business with you. If it’s strong enough, it can even help you avoid personal guarantees.

Improving your business credit rating can make it easier for your small business to get loans and lines of credit, or improve your existing credit terms. Furthermore, it can lower your interest rates and insurance premiums to help your business save money. 

In short, it’s time to get back to business and focus on making your business credit work to your advantage… Take the time to know it, protect it, improve it and build it.

We’re all aware of the increasingly bold moves fraudsters take to steal personal identities to secure jobs, cars, homes and more—but what about business-to-business fraud? As a small business owner, how much thought do you give to fraud protection for your business?

You have a lot to fear and even more to lose if you become a victim of commercial fraud. Approximately 30 percent of all business credit losses are attributed to some type of misleading or fraudulent information. Ultimately, financial damages from these and other business scams far overshadow losses from consumer fraud. View Experian’s white paper on Identifying Small Business Fraud to get more information about types of common fraud.

On average, losses are 3 to 10 times higher than personal identity theft damages. So, it’s time you become aware of business credit fraud. To learn more about protecting your business, and what to do if it falls victim to fraud, click here.

There are many varying answers to this question, including one that often gets overlooked…. We all know that a prime factor for business success relies on being able to generate customers, and generating customers often means having the business capital and financial means required to market effectively to those customers. So what’s an important “To-Do” to have a successful business? The answer should include: Monitor and maintain a healthy credit score! Why? Because a good small business credit score will grant a growing business the best financial terms and capital to help you gain customers. Want more? Here are four compelling reasons to monitor your business credit:  http://www.businesscreditfacts.com/pdp.aspx?pg=faq-19&lsv=www

Unlike personal credit information, which is regulated and can be viewed only with the permission of the report holder, access to business credit is not as restricted. Business credit information is available to anyone for any reason, including customers, competitors and suppliers. This makes it imperative to monitor your business credit on a regular basis and proactively manage it. Outdated or incorrect information can give the wrong impression about your business, resulting in unfavorable decisions by potential lenders and creditors – which can negatively impact your bottom line. Plus, if your business has grown or changed over the last year, it’s important to update the data reflected in your report. It can help your business reputation. For more information on how to update your business information, visit www.BusinessCreditFacts.com.

We’re honoring small businesses and their owners during National Small Business Week, May 16-20, with the gift of knowledge. This week only, business owners and principals can view their small business credit profile for FREE at SmartBusinessReports.com/SmallBusinessWeek. This is a limited, one-time offer per person, so act now before it is gone, and share the news with your business colleagues and friends.

In addition, business owners can also download a free ebook entitled, “Business Credit: What you don’t know can hurt you,” which discusses the fundamentals of business credit, and provides tips on managing a healthy business credit profile.

We receive a lot of questions about using “blended” data, meaning the use of both business and consumer data when making a business credit decision.  First and foremost, you need to have permissible purpose to use consumer data on a business.  (Permissible purpose is a set of rules established by the federal government on how consumer information can be used.)

Once you have permissible purpose, you can be authorized to access blended data. Does blended data drive better results?  Every study we have done shows it provides improved results.

For example, we looked at 50,000 small businesses that were all paying their bills fine at the start of the study.  Four quarters later 18% had seriously delinquent payments.  We then looked at the commercial data and consumer data of the business owners.  Our objective was to find out whether the business or consumer data would have provided the first warning signal of the delinquent payments. 

The results was 54% of the time business data provided the first indication of a slow payment while consumer data provided the early warning 46% of the time.  So while business data was slightly more predictive, really it shows  both sets of data were needed to be fully effective.