Overview of Data Points

A data point is a single piece of credit information about a customer. Examples of data points include: the number or amount of past due invoices; bank account average balance; percentage of invoices paid promptly; and the customer's credit ratings with external agencies.

The data points assigned to a case folder form the basis for making determinations about a customer's creditworthiness. A collection of specific data points is also used by a scoring model to calculate the customer's credit score.

Data Point Categories

Credit Management provides a set of predefined data points in several categories.

These categories are:

Aging: Data related to customer open balances.
Bank References: Information about customer bank accounts.
Billing and Payments: Customer transaction and payment history.
Business Information and Credit: Data related to customer credit history, both within your own enterprise and with external credit agencies and monitoring services.
Collateral: Information about customer collateral, as it relates to establishing or requesting credit.
Financial Data: Data related to the health of a customer business, such as profits, losses, and cash flow.
Guarantors: Information about third parties willing to guarantee customer credit.
References: Information about third parties that provide references for the customer.
Trade References: Information from third parties in the same trade that provide statements of creditworthiness for the customer.
Venture Funding: Information about investment funding for the customer.
Additional: Additional data points available for user-defined categories and values.

Scorable and Non-Scorable Data Points

Use scorable data points to provide numeric financial data about a customer and to create a scoring model. Use non-scorable data points for additional reference information.

For a scoring model, a scorable data point requires you to enter possible value ranges for the given item of data and to assign a numeric score to each value range to reflect the possible credit risk.

For example, the data point that identifies the count of customer past due invoices may have ranges from 0-10 (low credit risk), 10-50 (moderate credit risk), and 50-100 (high credit risk).

A non-scorable data point provides additional reference information for a credit review, independent of the score calculation. This additional information can be a factor in making a credit decision.

For example, if a customer has a business location in a high-risk country, this can potentially reduce its credit rating.