economic report
Introduction
A commercial report, also known as a "credit report", "commercial risk report", "commercial history report", "credit risk report" or "credit investigation", is a report on an individual or legal entity referring to its commercial and financial performance and the fulfillment of its obligations in these areas, together with the information necessary for the correct identification of the person or entity in question.
Commercial reports are regularly requested by banks and companies and credit givers in general, as an element that helps them in the decision to deny or grant credit and, in the latter case, define the guarantees to be required and the limits thereof. However, this traditional function of the commercial report as a prior step to the evaluation of a credit business has been considerably expanded, and numerous utilities can currently be mentioned for which these reports are required, such as:
The ability of a commercial report to analyze the actual financial solvency of a person or company depends directly on the information provided and it is generally recognized that they cannot act as sole predictors of credit behavior.
Sources of information
Under the name of commercial report there is a wide variety of reports with different scopes, being able to broadly distinguish, on the one hand, those that are limited to eventually identifying negative aspects (bankruptcies, rejected checks), and on the other, those that additionally include positive information, such as the ownership of real estate, automobiles or shares in companies.
The information contained in a commercial report is obtained from different data banks compiled or accessed by the companies that provide them. Information from publicly accessible sources can be distinguished from information originating from the private registries of companies or banks affiliated with credit information centers.
Public access sources usually include official journals of legal and judicial publications and information on judicial or administrative cases. As part of the private information that Banks and companies provide to credit information centers, there is the history of compliance in the payment of credit cards, credits granted by Banks, payment history in public service companies, and others.
When consulting commercial reports or commercial risk reports, they usually include a , which consists of an indicator that predicts the level of commercial risk.