Credit assessment (kreditvurdering)
Also known as credit check, credit rating, credit score, creditworthiness, credit status, business credit check, kredittjek, kreditopslag, kreditværdighed, kreditrating, kreditscore, kreditstatus, kreditvurderingsproces, kreditvurdering af virksomhed
A credit assessment is the judgement of whether a customer can and will pay — made before you deliver, not afterwards.
In practice
The cheapest collection case is the one you never get. The credit assessment is the only point in the entire process where you can avert the loss instead of recovering it.
A usable assessment brings together three things: can they pay (accounts, equity, liquidity), do they usually pay (payment history and default records), and who is liable (company form, ownership, guarantees).
The first two are data. The third is the one that decides whether there is anybody there at all when things go wrong.
Where it commonly goes wrong
- The customer is assessed once and never again. A customer that was sound two years ago may be heading for compulsory dissolution today. That is what monitoring is for.
- Only the new customers are assessed. The biggest losses typically come from old, trusted customers who have slowly deteriorated.