Small businesses extend credit to their customers every day, with far less information than big companies have. Truverto is my project to change that.
Why is selling on credit risky?
For many small and midsize businesses (SMBs), extending trade credit to customers is essential for growth. But it is also risky. The average company loses 2% of sales each year when customers fail to pay and receivables are written off as uncollectible.
This problem is as old as business sales. Companies dealt with it by sharing information within small local or industry networks, and they still do. But that doesn't scale in national and international markets, and SMBs surrendered control to a handful of business credit bureaus.
Truverto is a project to return control to small businesses. Modern computing, networking and AI mean that businesses can safely and securely take part in very large credit groups, and use them to grow sales and reduce risk. One often overlooked tool is the trade payment exchange, like the ones operated by Dun & Bradstreet, Creditsafe and Experian.
Who are the business credit bureaus?
Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) is the biggest provider of business credit data in the US. It has been publishing business credit reports for more than 180 years, and its D-U-N-S number has become a standard ID for American companies. Creditsafe is much younger. It started in Europe and now competes with D&B. Other providers include Experian and the Small Business Financial Exchange.
Your company's credit score matters because suppliers use it to decide your credit limits and payment terms, and the best known score is D&B's PAYDEX.
What is the D&B PAYDEX Score?
The PAYDEX Score is the best known business credit score, at least in North America. It's a proprietary score calculated by D&B, and it's essentially a dollar-weighted indicator of your company's past payment performance.
The score is based on "trade references," the records of your payments that your suppliers and vendors send to D&B. They can show payments made on time or early, or bills that went overdue or to collections. The PAYDEX Score ranges from 1 to 100, in three risk levels:
- High risk (0–49): a high chance of late payments
- Moderate risk (50–79): a moderate chance of late payments
- Low risk (80–100): a low chance of late payments
Can you improve your score directly?
Not really. Many businesses try by submitting their own payment records to the credit bureaus. But D&B, Creditsafe and the others don't trust self-reported payments, and they try to contact your suppliers to verify them. That usually fails because (1) the bureaus don't put much effort into it, if any, and (2) suppliers are busy and don't respond.
Some of the bureaus offer a free service where you claim your company's record, view and edit its information, and see very basic information from your credit reports. At least in theory, you can also dispute trade references you think are wrong, if you can find them. As I write this, D&B's free dashboard doesn't let you see the trade references others have submitted.
Truverto has a step-by-step guide to improving your D&B PAYDEX score.
Should you ask your suppliers to report your payments?
Yes. The real way to improve your business credit score is to pay your bills on time and have your suppliers report your payment history to D&B. There are two ways to do that:
- Buy from businesses that already report to D&B. Grainger, Staples and Uline are examples.
- Ask your own suppliers to report to D&B. This probably helps more, because you buy more, and more often, from your core suppliers.
What is a trade payment exchange?
Trade payment exchanges, or trade credit exchanges, are how the big credit bureaus collect those trade references. They work on a "give to get" model. Businesses contribute their accounts receivable (AR) aging reports, a snapshot of who owes them money. The data are pooled and anonymized, which gives a more complete view of how customers pay across many suppliers and industries.
In return for contributing, you get information about your business customers, including how well they're paying their other suppliers. Together, that helps you keep accurate customer records and judge the creditworthiness and payment risk of your customers.
Why should small businesses join one?
Inaccurate data, late payments and defaults ripple through supply chains. By joining a trade payment exchange, you protect your own finances. The benefits include:
- A cleaner customer list. You can clean up and enrich your customer records with legal names, parent and subsidiary relationships, office addresses, industry codes and so on.
- Better credit decisions. As a contributor, you see how your customers pay others. Better decisions speed up order-to-cash and reduce days sales outstanding (DSO).
- Lower fraud risk. The average organization loses about 5% of revenue to fraud, and some of it could be hiding in places like bad debt.
Why don't small businesses report already?
It isn't well known, but you and your suppliers don't have to be Fortune 1000 companies to report to D&B and Creditsafe. The trouble is that the process is very manual, for you and for the credit bureaus, so everyone prefers to work with larger companies.
Fixing this is how Truverto is working to democratize credit reporting. Truverto takes the manual work out of trade payment exchanges and puts the results back into your workflow. It connects to your accounting software and automates the whole process:
- Securely pulling your AR aging reports from Intuit QuickBooks or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
- Submitting them automatically to the trade payment exchanges
- Bringing the results back to you as reports and enriched customer records
Final thoughts
You can't pay to fix your business credit score. You can't improve your score by yourself.
Small businesses can improve their credit scores and data by working together in a credit network that scales. You keep control, and you build more accurate and trustworthy profiles of your business, your customers and your suppliers.
Want to learn more or get started? Visit truverto.com.
By Brian Suthoff · January 13, 2026 · Updated November 13, 2026