The financial world is changing and so is everything about it, be it investments, retail services, or credit facilities. Every dimension is fast progressing towards making them simple, fast, direct, and convenient. The financiers now understand well the recurrent and diverse financial necessities of businesses and the need for their efficient resolution. One such very helpful step for businesses is to establish business credit, a facility where the financial institutions extend corporate loans for a business, as an entity, without requiring the owner’s personal assets or credit rating as security. The best part is legal organizations of every age and size can avail this facility, new, old, big, or small, with any type of business needs, establishing a business, expansion, diversification, equipment or material purchases, advertising, or any other valid corporate reason.
But the question is how? What do you need to do to get loans for your business without putting your personal assets and credits at risk? This article explores just that, in particular, how to establish business credit. We are discussing here the various dos and don’ts for the businesses to build eligibility for raising corporate credits.
Dos. The following tips guide you towards gaining a sound grounding for getting corporate credits:
- Legal entity. The financial institutions grant you corporate credits after verifying the soundness of your business as an entity. Therefore, it is very important that you have a definite status for it as an LLC, or a corporation, as applicable. Do ensure that all the legal papers of your organization are up to date, including your business license. This is vital to in the steps to establish business credit.
- Contact details. Your business must have a physical address, not a P.O. Box address, and a dedicated business telephone connection. This authenticates your business’ worthiness.
- Financiers. You need to find ‘genuine’ financiers who can extend you business credit without requiring your personal assets and credits details. You ‘must’ also ensure that these institutions, after disbursing loans to your organization, inform the business credit reporting services so that they take a note of your organization. This is a valuable step towards establishing business credit history just like your personal one.
- Personal Credit. If you have good personal credit it is much easier to obtain unsecured business lines of credit. If you do not have good personal credit, rest assured you can still establish business credit.
Donts. You should avoid the following steps vis-a -vis corporate credit:
- Personal credit. While attempting to build your business history, do not ignore building your personal credit. Keep shaping your sound personal credit as well, so that you have better liquidity and a sound credit record over a period.
- Business age. Your organization’s age can have much influence on your corporate credit. If your organization is older than 24 months it will be easier to obtain credit, however, you do not need to bother about forming an aged or shelf organization to establish business credit. Your new business can contrive sound corporate credit.
- Buying credit. You must not indulge into this. Some companies sell some business information to other organizations. This trade references buying proposition is out and out dicey for your business as it can get a “high risk” rating anytime.
