Opening the business credit file
The records a lender or bureau looks for first — EIN, registered address, and a business name that matches everywhere it appears.
Subject Business credit for a new LLC
Building credit under the LLC, not under you
A business credit file is a separate record from the owner's. This site is being put together to explain how one is opened for a new LLC, what actually goes into it, and where the two records stay joined whatever the entity type says.
The file is empty today — no write-ups have been filed yet. The four tabs above set out the subject, what the file will hold, how it is kept, and the order it will be worked through.
No documents on file Index of the file
02
Dividers cut, documents to come
Six dividers · none filledKeeping the business file apart from yours
Where a personal guarantee re-attaches the two, and what a new LLC can realistically do about it.
Trade accounts and which of them report
Net-30 supplier accounts are the usual first entries. Not all of them are reported anywhere, which is the part that catches people out.
Business cards for a young entity
What an issuer weighs when the entity has no history of its own, and what that means for the application.
What the business bureaus record
Which files exist on a company, what goes into them, and who is able to pull one.
Reading and correcting the record
How to see what is held on the entity, and the route to fixing an entry that is wrong.
These are section dividers, not articles. Each one is a heading the file is being built under; when a write-up is filed behind a divider it becomes a link from here.
03
Notes on how this file is kept
Three notes Handling
Worth stating before there is anything to read
Business credit is a subject that attracts invented numbers. These notes are what the writing here will be held to, and they are set down now so they can be checked against later.
Note A
Nothing here is scored
No ratings, no tier boards, no gauges or dials. Where options are ordered, they are ordered in words with the reasoning shown next to them.
Note B
Terms are taken from the source
Vendor and issuer requirements change often. Anything specific is attributed and dated, or it is described in words rather than stated as a figure.
Note C
Commission is disclosed
Some links earn a commission. That never decides the order things appear in, and it is stated on every page it applies to.
04
The order the file is worked through
Four stages 01
Get the entity records straight
Name, address, phone and EIN have to agree with each other before anything else is worth doing. Most early problems are record problems.
02
Open the first reporting accounts
A file only exists once something reports to it. The question is which accounts report, not which are easiest to open.
03
Hold the line between the two files
Personal guarantees, shared cards and mixed banking all pull the business record back toward the owner.
04
Pull the record and check it
What is held on the entity is not always right, and correcting it is a separate job from building it.
Stage marks are positions in a sequence. They are not a grade, a rating or a measure of anything, and nothing on this site will be.