 There are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to business credit. I'm Geri Dettweiler. I'm known as a credit expert and I'm going to bust a few myths about business credit. A lot of business owners don't understand that their business credit could impact their ability to grow their business, whether that means getting financing, purchasing another business, or landing that key customer or key partner. Lenders may check your credit if they're thinking about giving you a loan. Your suppliers or vendors may review your business credit either to approve a large order or to extend you payment terms. Insurance companies can check business credit and it can even make or break your opportunity to get a big contract. If you want to do business with the big retailers, chances are they're going to check business credit to make sure your business is reliable and able to provide the products or services you're promising. The number one reason business owners don't have strong business credit is because they aren't doing business with companies that report. Business credit is voluntary. That means you may have to be proactive and seek out companies that do report to business credit and do some business with them so that you can build those credit references and then pay those bills on time every single month if at all possible. There's a misconception about how late payments appear on business credit. With business credit, if you have a pattern of late payments that may appear on your business credit, impact your business credit scores and impact your ability to get other financing. If you're having trouble paying your bills on time because your clients aren't paying your bills on time, then you want to look at a couple of different approaches. One is to potentially incentivize your customers, give them a discount if they pay early, for example. You could consider talking to your vendors or suppliers and seeing if you could negotiate different terms with them. If you have a supplier that lets you pay on net 30 terms, maybe they'll let you extend that to net 45 or net 60 terms and that may improve your cash flow. The last thing you want as a business owner is to know that you need money right away for that opportunity or that crisis and you can't get it because there's something holding you back in your business credit. Checking your business credit can give you confidence so you can apply and not worry that something you don't know about may get in your way.