Business Credit Scores Explained: PAYDEX, Intelliscore And FICO SBSS

PAYDEX (Dun & Bradstreet)

Scale: 1 to 100. PAYDEX is the simplest of the three because it measures one thing: whether you paid your suppliers on time, weighted by how much money was involved. D&B publishes that 80 corresponds to paying on terms, with higher scores reflecting payment ahead of terms and lower scores reflecting lateness.

Two consequences follow from that design. First, PAYDEX is the one model where paying early genuinely moves the number, because the scale extends above "on terms". Second, it is dollar-weighted, so a large account paid late costs more than a small one — and a file made entirely of small accounts moves slowly whatever you do.

PAYDEX needs trade experiences to exist at all. If nobody reports to D&B about you, there is no PAYDEX score, only a file with nothing in it.

Intelliscore Plus (Experian)

Scale: 1 to 100, where higher is better and the number is a risk ranking — Experian's stated purpose is predicting serious delinquency in the coming months, not describing your character.

Intelliscore is broader than PAYDEX. Experian describes it as drawing on tradeline and collections history, public records, and firmographic data such as time in business and company size. Some versions blend in the owner's consumer data on smaller businesses, which is one of several reasons the wall between business and personal credit is thinner than it is usually described.

The model is proprietary and the weightings are not published. Anyone telling you the exact percentage that payment history contributes to Intelliscore is repeating a number somebody made up.

FICO SBSS

Scale: 0 to 300. SBSS is the one most likely to decide an actual loan, and the one business owners have heard of least. It is a blended score: it pulls from business bureau data, the owner's personal consumer credit, and application and financial data supplied by the lender.

It is used as a screening step in SBA 7(a) small-loan processing, and the SBA has published a minimum screening score for that purpose. Treat any specific threshold you read — including on this page — as needing confirmation, because the SBA has moved it before and the operative number lives in its current SOP rather than in an article.

The blended design is the part worth internalising. On a small business, SBSS can be materially affected by the owner's personal credit report, which means "I am building business credit so my personal credit stops mattering" is not how it works at the loan sizes most people are actually applying for.

Which One Is Being Pulled?

You usually cannot know in advance, which is the honest and unsatisfying answer. Suppliers extending trade terms lean toward D&B. Banks and SBA lenders lean toward SBSS. Alternative and equipment lenders vary, and Experian and Equifax commercial data appear throughout.

The planning implication is the same one that shows up everywhere in this subject: a file that only exists at one bureau is a coin flip. Reporting to more than one is not a nicety, it is the difference between the underwriter finding something and finding nothing.

What You Can And Cannot See

Business credit reports do not come with the free-annual-report right that consumer reports do — that right comes from the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which covers consumer reports, not commercial ones. In practice you buy access to your own business file, from each bureau, separately.

The same distinction has a sharper edge on disputes. FCRA's investigation timelines and furnisher duties are consumer-report law. Commercial bureaus have their own dispute processes, and they are not the same thing. It is worth knowing which set of rights you are actually operating under before you need them.