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April 2009
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Welcome to INNOVATE!, an administrative resource for small business owners. INNOVATE! is a product of Cybertary, a professional Virtual Assisting company. In these monthly emails we will be giving you numerous resources and tips you can use in your business, your home, your office and your life!
It's April Fool's Day! Cybertary shows you several ways not to be a fool this month. We start with ways to protect yourself from identity theft. Then we move into helping you understand how your personal credit works, so that you can be proactive in managing credit. With many businesses, personal credit and business credit are closely connected, so we help you understand your business Dun & Bradstreet report. Let Cybertary help you gain the insight you need for better business credit...and we ain't foolin'!
Enjoy!
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Protect Yourself from Identity Theft
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 Nearly one out of ten Americans was the victim of identity theft during the past five years, so you’d be a fool to think it couldn’t happen to you. What you may not realize, however, is the profound impact it will have on your life, especially if you are a small business owner.
Consider this: 47 percent of identity theft victims have trouble getting credit or a loan as a result of identity theft, and 70 percent have trouble getting rid of (or never get rid of) negative information in their financial records and credit reports. The average cost of identity theft to a business is in excess of $15,000, and the amount of time needed to repair the damage runs an average of 330 hours.
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Understanding How Credit Works
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 The Best Way to Higher Credit Scores
Anyone who has ever applied for a home mortgage or an auto loan knows that their personal credit score is the single most important factor in determining first if they qualify for a loan and, if so, what type of loan they get and what rate of interest they pay. That’s because a credit score calculates the probability that an individual borrower will actually make their payments on time.
Credit scoring was first introduced in 1958 by the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO), and for more than 35 years, the FICO score was the key indicator used by lenders across the U.S. Then in 1995, Fair Isaac developed business credit scoring to address the growing small business lending market. Most banks now use some form of credit scoring model to determine commercial loan decisions. The primary source for business credit scores is Paydex from Dun & Bradstreet.
Most banks and investors will use both the FICO score of the business owner and the Paydex score of the business to determine whether you get a loan and on what terms. What is evident, however, is that if you don’t understand the credit scoring systems, your scores are likely to be less than you may want or need.
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How to Read a Dun & Bradstreet Report
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Understanding Your Business Credit
 Dun & Bradstreet is to business credit as FICO is to personal credit. It provides detailed reports on more than 125 million companies in more than 200 countries, including the largest volume of business-credit information in the world. Since these reports help companies like yours decide who to do business with, it’s important to know how to read their report both to evaluate other companies and to know what’s being said about yours.
The report, however, can be a bit intimidating to read. Here are summaries of some significant portions of a Dun & Bradstreet report.
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CyberQuick-Tip - BusinessHelpingBusiness.com
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BusinessHelpingBusiness.com is a free business resource for entrepreneurs and business owners. BusinessHelpingBusiness.com is founded on the principle that businesses can help other businesses survive and succeed by making needs known and favors available. It's an entirely grassroots movement to bring together large and small, global and local, and product and service businesses alike through cooperation. To get started, you simply subscribe to The Needs & Haves List to receive regular emails of the needs and haves submitted by business owners and entrepreneurs. If you see a need you can fulfill or a have that interests you, go for it! Likewise, you can submit your needs and your haves to the list as well. Cooperation, not competition, that businesses can grow together. Spread the karma!
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THEME - Spring Cleaning for Business
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Thank you for taking the time to read our monthly newsletter. We aim to create articles that are informative and useful for the small business owner and entrepreneur. If you know of someone else who would enjoy our newsletter, please forward this to them using the link below and suggest that they self-subscribe. If you know of someone who can benefit from our services please let us know. We are always here to help.
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This newsletter is a product of Cybertary, Inc. Please review our policy for reprinting any portion of this newsletter on your own site.
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