How to check your business credit score (and the personal files lenders pull too)

Most owners have never looked at their business’s credit file. That’s understandable: nobody sends it to you, there’s no single official version, and the free reports you hear about are personal ones. But every lender, and plenty of suppliers, look at it before deciding whether to extend credit. Checking it yourself takes an hour or two and occasionally turns up something that would have quietly sunk an application.

This guide covers where your files live, which checks are free, how to read what comes back and what to do about anything you don’t like.

Where does your business’s credit history actually live?

There isn’t one business credit score. There are several files, held by different organisations, and a lender may pull any combination of them.

File	Who holds it	What’s in it	Cost to check
Commercial credit file for the company, trust or ABN	Business bureaus such as CreditorWatch, Equifax and Experian	Credit enquiries, defaults, court actions, ATO tax default listings, ASIC notices, related entities	Usually paid, sometimes a free trial
Personal credit file for each director, partner or guarantor	Equifax and Experian	Personal loans and cards, repayment history, defaults, enquiries, and often commercial enquiries and directorships	Free every three months
ASIC register (companies)	ASIC	Company name, status, registered address, officeholders, documents lodged	Basic search free; extracts cost a fee
ABN register	Australian Business Register	ABN status, entity name, GST registration, business names	Free on ABN Lookup

The bureau landscape has also changed recently. Experian bought illion in 2024, and the privacy regulator’s guidance on accessing your credit report now names Equifax and Experian as the bureaus to contact. CreditorWatch operates only on the commercial side. If you read older advice telling you to check “Equifax, Experian and illion”, the practical update is two consumer bureaus plus whichever business bureaus your lenders use.

Step 1: check each director’s personal report

Start with the free part, because for most small businesses it carries the most weight. If you’re a sole trader, partner or company director who’ll be asked to guarantee a loan, your personal file will almost certainly be checked.

The credit reporting rules entitle you to one no-cost report from each bureau per quarter. A further free copy is available after a credit refusal within the previous 90 days, or once a correction has been made to your file. Request one from each of Equifax and Experian, directly through their websites. You’ll need to verify your identity with a licence, passport or Medicare card, and it can take a few days to arrive.

Do this for every person who’ll sign: you, your co-director, a spouse who’ll guarantee. A clean file for you and a forgotten default on your business partner’s file still adds up to a problem.

Watch out for “free credit score” websites that ask for card details or push you into a subscription. The free statutory report from the bureau itself is all you need.

Step 2: order your business’s commercial report

Business reports aren’t covered by the same free-access rule. Commercial credit information falls under the general privacy principles, which require organisations to keep it accurate and correct it when it’s wrong, but they don’t guarantee you a free copy.

In practice you have three options:

• Buy a single report on your own company or ABN from a business bureau.
• Use a free trial. Some business bureaus offer short trials that include running reports; CreditorWatch, for instance, advertises a 14-day trial as at October 2026. Cancel before it rolls into a subscription if you don’t need ongoing monitoring.
• Ask your accountant or broker. Many have subscriptions and can run a report and walk you through it.

If you only have budget for one, ask a broker or a lender you’re likely to approach which bureau it uses, and start there.

Step 3: run the free public-register checks

These take ten minutes and catch errors at the source, before they’re copied into bureau files.

• ABN Lookup. Confirm the ABN is active, the legal name and entity type are right, GST registration shows the correct date, and your business names are listed.
• ASIC’s register. For a company, check status (registered, not deregistered or under external administration), the registered office, principal place of business and current directors. An ex-director still listed, or an old address, can mismatch what you put on an application.

Many verification delays come from the details on these registers not matching the application. Fixing a registered address before applying is far easier than explaining it afterwards.

Curious which funders would look past what’s on your file? Put the question to us. It’s a sixty-second form, and no credit search is run on the back of it.

Step 4: read the report properly

When the business report arrives, the score will be the first thing you see. Resist the urge to judge everything by it. Each bureau has its own scale: CreditorWatch’s RiskScore, for example, runs from 0 to 850 alongside letter grades from A1 down to F, and it describes the score as predicting the chance of default over the next 12 months. Other bureaus use different ranges and bands, so a number on one isn’t comparable with another.

Instead, work through the entries:

1. Identity details. Correct entity name, ABN and ACN, addresses, directors. Any related entities you don’t recognise?
2. Credit enquiries. Every application for credit, with the provider and often the amount. Do you recognise each one? A cluster in one month is something a lender will ask about.
3. Defaults and payment information. Any supplier or lender listings. Is each one accurate, and if paid, is it marked as paid?
4. Court actions and judgments. Including claims that have since been settled.
5. ATO tax default listings. A tax debt can be passed to the bureaus by the ATO once it reaches $100k, has sat unpaid beyond 90 days, and the owners haven’t engaged with the tax office about it. Our guide to how the ATO reports tax debts to credit bureaus explains how a listing is triggered and removed.
6. ASIC notices and external administration. Anything about late lodgements, strike-off action or insolvency events.

On the personal reports, look for the same categories plus repayment history (a 0 to 7 code for each month, recording whether payments were more than 14 days late) and any directorships or proprietorships linked to your name. Our step-by-step on how to read a credit report goes line by line.

What if something’s wrong?

For personal reports, the rules are firm. Contact the credit provider that listed the item or the bureau itself; there’s no charge. Where the error is accepted, the fix has to happen inside 30 days (unless you agree to more time) and you must be told in writing. If they disagree, they must explain why and tell you how to complain.

For business reports, contact the bureau and the business that listed the information. The privacy principles still require reasonable steps to correct inaccurate, out-of-date or misleading information.

Keep copies of everything: the report, your request, the response. If an error is still being fixed when you apply for finance, those copies let a lender see the dispute for what it is.

An example: the director who wasn’t the problem

Here’s an illustrative case. Two directors run a Hobart joinery company and plan to apply for $120k of equipment finance. The lead director checks her personal reports from Equifax and Experian: both clean. She orders a business report through a trial and finds a C3 grade on a 0 to 850 scale, which surprises her.

Reading the entries explains it. Three credit enquiries in five weeks from a period when her co-director had shopped around for a vehicle loan through the company, and a $2,100 default listed by a freight supplier over an invoice they’d disputed and later settled. On the co-director’s personal report sits the same freight default linked to him as a sole trader from years earlier.

She contacts the freight supplier, which confirms in writing that the account was settled and asks the bureau to mark it paid. She holds off applying for a few weeks, then approaches a single lender with a short note explaining the enquiry cluster. The lender has nothing left to guess at.

How do lenders use what you’ve found?

Banks tend to use business and personal scores as early filters; a weak score can end the conversation before anyone reads the detail. That’s not a criticism, it’s how they keep their pricing low. If your files are clean and your financials are strong, a bank will often be your cheapest option.

Non-bank and specialist lenders read the detail more than the number. A paid default with an explanation, an ATO listing with a payment plan now in place, or a run of enquiries from one bad month can all be weighed against strong bank statements or property security. If a low score is what’s holding you back, our page on business loans with a low credit score sets out the options. For the work of lifting the score itself, turn to our companion guide on improving a business credit score.

You’ve checked your file. Now find out what it can get you

Knowing exactly what’s on your credit files is a real advantage. You can apply where you’ll be welcomed, explain anything unusual in the first sentence and skip lenders who’ll say no on autopilot.

That’s where we come in. Our enquiry asks for about a minute of your time, and sending it doesn’t touch any credit file, business or personal. Your information isn’t sprayed across a long list of lenders; one team keeps it and works on it. A person reads it, considers what’s on your file and calls you with options that suit. Tell us honestly about any defaults, enquiries or tax listings you found, so the funder we put forward already knows the full picture.

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