4 Numbers on Your D&B File That Matter More Than PAYDEX Alone

Ask most business owners what their Dun & Bradstreet file shows and they will name PAYDEX and stop there. PAYDEX matters, but it is a payment-timing score and nothing else. Larger lenders and many vendors look past it to a handful of other numbers that PAYDEX does not capture at all.

The 4 numbers

1. The D&B Rating. This combines your financial strength (based on net worth, often estimated unless you submit real financials) with a risk classification. A strong PAYDEX paired with a weak or unclear D&B Rating still reads as an incomplete file to underwriters who check both.
2. The Delinquency Predictor Score. This is a forward-looking risk score estimating the likelihood of your business becoming severely delinquent in the next 12 months, separate from your payment history to date.
3. The Financial Stress Score. This estimates the likelihood of financial distress, including business failure, and is pulled by some lenders and insurers independently of your payment history.
4. The number of trade experiences on file. Two businesses with an identical PAYDEX of 80 are not equal if one has 3 reporting tradelines and the other has 15. Volume of trade experience affects how much weight underwriters put on the score itself.

How to check all four

A D&B CreditSignal or similar monitoring product will show more of these numbers than a basic PAYDEX check. Submitting a financial statement through D&B's D-U-N-S Profile Manager, free, is also what moves the Rating away from a generic size-based estimate toward one based on your actual numbers.