Best ways to build business credit with Nav Prime

Your businesses’ reputation can mean the difference between failure and success. And your business credit history is an important part of your businesses’ reputation. Commercial credit reports and scores can be used by lenders, insurance companies, or other businesses to decide whether to do business with your company. 

If you’re a small business owner looking for a comprehensive tool to help your business build profile and maintain strong business credit, plus much more, Nav Prime offers the solution. 

Find out how Nav Prime can help you build business credit, and more importantly, grow a financially healthy business. 

What is Nav Prime?

Nav Prime is the one simple solution to strengthen your business’s financial health profile and ensure your business always has access to the best financing options. Actively improve what matters to lenders with Detailed Credit Reports to build credit and take action on personal and business credit insights, along with tradeline reporting. 

In addition the business credit-building Nav Prime Card, can double your tradelines, and a Nav Business Checking account can help you meet lender requirements and simplify money management.¹ The Nav Prime Card is a charge card. (Learn about charge cards vs credit cards here.)

What does Nav Prime have to do with building business credit?

Whether you’re an entrepreneur running a new business or an established one, figuring out how to establish business credit can be challenging. But it doesn’t have to be complicated. To build a business credit, you’ll need accounts that report to business credit bureaus such as Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax and Experian. These are often referred to as “tradelines.” 

Not all lenders report to commercial credit bureaus, however, which means you may not be getting credit for the accounts your business pays on time. 

Nav Prime offers two ways to add valuable tradelines to your business credit reports with the major business credit bureaus.

1. Nav Prime. Nav Prime offers access to three detailed business credit reports and two personal credit reports in one place. Your Nav Prime payment is reported as a monthly tradeline to the major business credit reporting agencies. 

Here’s how helpful that tradeline can be. Customers who used Nav’s Detailed Credit Reports with tradeline reporting saw an increase in business credit scores of up to 50% in the first 3 months.² 

2. Nav Prime Card: Additionally, with the new Nav Prime Card, everyday business purchases become credit-building opportunities. Get the Nav Prime Card and timely, successful repayments will be automatically reported to the major business credit bureaus as a monthly tradeline, helping build business credit history. 

The Nav Prime Card offers a unique opportunity to double your tradelines when you use it with Detailed Credit Reporting. 

Essential tips for using Nav Prime

Ultimately, you want your business to be ready for anything. Strengthen your business financial health profile with Nav Prime. While you can choose the features your business needs, you’ll get the maximum value from Nav Prime by using all the available features, including the Nav Prime Card, Nav Business Checking and Detailed Credit Reports. 

Here’s how to make the most of Nav Prime. 

1. Monitor your credit reports

Information in your credit reports can change. Make sure you know what lenders see and track your progress by reviewing your Detailed Credit Reports regularly. In addition to monitoring your personal credit scores and business credit scores, look for key information in your reports including:

• Number of credit accounts
• Balances
• Payment history
• Credit utilization
• UCC filings (business credit only)
• Negative information such as late payments or collection accounts

Building good business credit isn’t a task you take on once and never think about again. You’ll want to continue to build and monitor your creditworthiness to help ensure your business is as financially attractive as possible, whether that’s to qualify for small business loans, land new partners or clients, or perhaps even to sell your business in the future. 

Monitoring business credit is also important to identify whether your business may be a target of business identity theft. 

2. Follow other businesses’ credit

With Nav Prime you can monitor up to five other business’ credit reports so you can understand the financial responsibility of potential business partners. You may choose to follow key clients or suppliers, for example. This can help you understand the risk of providing goods or services to other businesses without getting paid in advance, or expose potential weaknesses in your supply chain. 

3. Use your Nav Prime Card for everyday expenses

Your Nav Prime Card can help you build your business credit history through tradeline reporting. Use your account for everyday expenses as well as recurring expenses like subscriptions, gas, and office supplies. 

The Nav Prime Card is a charge card. You’ll link an external bank account or your Nav Business Checking account, which will set your credit limit and be used for daily repayment. Nav will track your transactions throughout the month on your Nav Prime card and report the total credit utilized and extended in aggregate during the month as a tradeline, which can help build business credit. 

4. Track your expenses with insights

Both the Nav Business Checking and Nav Prime Cards can help you stay on top of your business financial health. Use them for your business expenses, and you can separate your personal finances from your business finances so you can quickly keep tabs on your business cash flow. 

You’ll also find tax time is a lot easier when you use accounts dedicated strictly to business income and expenses. If you have formed a business entity it’s especially crucial to have dedicated business accounts as commingling funds (using personal credit cards for business expenses or vice versa) can put your personal assets at risk. 

5. Download the Nav mobile app

Running a business is hard work, and you probably juggle many different roles as a business owner. Managing your business finances is one of your most important jobs.

Take Nav Prime with you with the Nav Mobile App, available for iOS in the App Store or for android in the Google Play store. 

When you link your bank account with Nav you’ll be able to instantly monitor revenue, cash in and cash out, recent transactions, account balances and more. 

Use the expense tracking features in the app to categorize purchases and monitor spending. These insights can help you understand when you may need to make adjustments, whether it’s trying to reduce fixed or variable expenses, or looking for creative ways to increase revenues. 

Take advantage of the financial health tools like cash flow projections and insights to make informed business decisions. Managing cash flow well is both an art and science. It starts with a clear understanding of where your business cash flow stands at any given time. Nav’s cash flow tools will allow you to understand this key business metric at a glance, at any time. 

6. Review your financing matches

With Nav, you can view your top financial options from 160+ trusted loans and credit cards based on your business data. Whether you use the mobile app or log in from your desktop computer or tablet at Nav.com, periodically review your financing matches.

The best time to seek financing is often before you need it. You’ll have more time to explore options and make an informed decision than when in the middle of a crisis (or key opportunity) where you need money yesterday. 

Nav shows you what lenders are looking for, so you know what you need to do next to access capital for your business and personalized insights from Nav can help you understand how business and personal credit impact your funding options.

Whether you need a line of credit, small business credit card or other types of financing, Nav can help you find the right financing based on your business credit profile and other data. 

Frequently asked questions