D&B Canada : FAQs for Data Solutions

How does D&B get its data?

We obtain our information from impartial third-party businesses and government sources. We then supplement it with information from millions of interviews with business owners and managers. Here are just a few of our resources:

Business bankruptcies are obtained from Industry Canada via an automated weekly data feed
Suits, liens and personal property security agreements are obtained directly from provincial and local court houses
Millions of trade experiences (payment information) tells us how individual businesses are paying their bills
Daily newspapers, publications, electronic news services and the Internet

We have up to 1,500 data elements on any given company, which gives you a more complete picture of a business. D&B is also the only global business information provider that collects financial statements on both publicly and privately held companies.

What does D&B do with the data it collects?

Before we enter any information into our database, it must first pass a number of quality checks. In fact, there are currently over 2,000 validations in our customized data entry system alone. We then supplement our checks with mainframe data-cleansing processes, like our Duplicate Report Protection System and Address Standardization.
Once the information is validated, it's entered into our database — the largest database of business information in the world. It's then made available to businesses around the globe. The data can be used in a myriad of ways, including:

Checking the credit rating of over 107 million companies (26 million in the United States alone and 1.5 million in Canada)
Compiling highly targeted lists of prospective customers
Tracking competitors' sales

How can I be certain the data D&B collects is up to date?

All data collected by D&B must first pass rigorous quality checks. Aside from our over 2,000 information validations on our customized data entry system, we randomly call companies and review the information we've compiled on their businesses. If you should question the information received about a company, a group of dedicated consultants are available to reinvestigate the information at no charge. Simply call our Customer Information Centre at 1.800.463.6362 to initiate a reinvestigation.

How do I get a D-U-N-S® Number so I can be listed in the D&B Database?

You can obtain a D-U-N-S Number by searching for your company. If your company name appears on the Search Results page, you already have a D-U-N-S Number and can call 1.800.463.6362 to obtain it. If your company name does not appear, simply click on the link to request a D-U-N-S Number at the top of the Search Results page.

What do I do if I can't find the business I'm looking for?

Simply contact D&B at 1.800.INFO.DNB (1.800.463.6362) Monday – Friday from 8:30 a.m. – 7 p.m. EST and one of our customer service representatives will do a search for you. If the company is not in our database, we can investigate the business for you at no extra charge and the report will be emailed to you promptly.

What kind of financial predictors are there in the D&B database?

We offer three standard predictors: Financial Stress Score (FSS), Commercial Credit Score (CCS) and Paydex. These indicators help you understand the risk of financial stress, delinquency and payment delays. We also offer services to statistically create customized predictors based on the needs of your business.

I don’t think I have a clean and complete database. Can D&B help me clean my data?

Yes, D&B offers many data-related services, and cleansing your data is one of them. We will obtain your data file(s) and send it through our DunsRight™ process, which our own data goes through. This process ensures that you don’t have inactive, duplicate or out-of-data records. We will identify which of your customers have gone out of business and how many companies are duplicated so that you can save on expensive marketing campaigns. You can also utilize D&B to add our world-class commercial data to your data file.

Does D&B offer data analytics and modeling services?

Yes, D&B has a team of highly qualified statisticians that hold Masters and Ph.D. degrees. We can help you with both sales and marketing and risk analytics projects. We offer services as simple as data analysis to see what your data looks like to regression modeling to enable you to get the most out of your database when combined with D&B data. Please check Data Solutions for further information on our analytics and modeling services.

How can D&B help me in ensuring that my cleansed data stays clean?

We understand the importance of clean data and offer many services to help our customers with this task. You can choose to subscribe to monthly or quarterly data-cleansing projects in which we’ll receive your updated data file and send it through our DunsRight™ process to ensure that it’s still current and clean before we return it to you.

You also have the option of using D&B data integration products that will interact with the D&B live database to ensure that your data is up to date. If you’re dealing with larger amounts of data with multiple sources, you can also choose to buy Purisma, our master data management product. Purisma will be implemented in your own environment to automatically interact with your multiple data sources and the D&B database to ensure that it maintains clean and current information.