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The business credit index: the number your suppliers decide by

Von Johanna Brecht, Redakteurin für Verbraucherfinanzen · 9.9.2026 · 9 Min. Lesezeit

The call comes on a Tuesday. Your supplier, the same contact person for six years, cancels the payment terms you agreed years ago: from now on it is payment in advance. When you ask what has happened, you get the answer people usually hear in these conversations. The terms were reviewed as a matter of routine.

In most cases nothing has happened. What has changed is a three-digit number in a file you have never seen. It has a name: Bonitätsindex, which translates as business credit index. Creditreform keeps it, and it exists for most German firms whether or not their owners know about it.

In the first half of 2026 corporate insolvencies rose by 7.8% to 12,900 cases. That is the highest level since 2013, with losses of around 28.5 billion euro. When the market looks like that, purchasing departments check this number more often and act on it faster. That is the reason to know your own figure before the Tuesday call comes.

The scale runs backwards

Anyone used to the SCHUFA score for private individuals will read the Bonitätsindex the wrong way round at first. SCHUFA is the consumer credit agency most people in Germany deal with; since March 2026 its score has run from 100 to 999, and there a higher figure is the better one. The business credit index does the opposite. It runs from 100 to 600, and low is good. 100 stands for very good creditworthiness, 600 for Zahlungseinstellung, the point at which a company has stopped paying.

That difference sounds like a detail. In bank meetings it causes misunderstandings on a regular basis. If someone tells you your figure has "improved", ask which way it actually moved. An index that has gone from 210 to 260 has got worse, not better.

Two values sit outside the ordinary scale. Creditreform treats 500 and 600 as default, explicitly. And where the facts about a company cannot be established at all, no index is issued. That, too, is a statement, and not a good one: a buyer who opens a report and finds no figure tends to assume the worst rather than the best.

What the classes actually mean

Creditreform publishes a probability of default for each class. The figures below cover the period from September 2022 to September 2023.

Across all German companies the average was 1.43%. A firm on 249 therefore sits well below the average risk. A firm on 320 sits at more than twice it.

In practice a line runs somewhere around 300. Below it, business on account normally goes ahead without much discussion. Above it the tone changes: limits are trimmed, payment terms shortened, deposits requested. Not because a buyer has decided you are dishonest, but because his trade credit insurer withdraws cover past certain values, which would leave the buyer carrying the risk alone.

Who reads this number besides you

Your customer's purchasing department reads it before granting payment terms. Your supplier's trade credit insurer reads it as well, and in practice that is the reader who matters most, because he is the one who says no. A supplier who delivers on account usually insures the receivable. If his cover for you is cut, he cannot give you terms even when he would like to. That is why the phone call often sounds oddly impersonal: your contact is passing on a decision she did not take and cannot reverse.

Then there is the leasing company before it finances a vehicle, the landlord before a commercial tenancy, larger clients before they add you to an approved supplier list, and the bank before every credit meeting. Almost none of them will tell you which figure they saw. You only get the outcome, usually phrased as a policy rather than a judgement about you.

Krediturteil and Kreditlimit

Alongside the index, a credit report carries two further entries that are read more often than the number itself. The Krediturteil, the credit opinion, is the sentence in which the agency classifies the business relationship. In Creditreform's sample report it reads "Kredite und Geschäftsverbindung sind zulässig", meaning credit and a business relationship are acceptable. It is also one of the twelve characteristics behind the index, where it carries a quarter of the weight.

The Kreditlimit, the credit limit, is an amount the agency considers a workable order of magnitude for an ongoing business relationship. The sample report shows 100,000 euro. What matters is what it is not: not a commitment, not a credit line, and not something you could rely on in a dispute. It is an assessment written for your business partner. He can ignore it, stay below it or go above it. The decision stays with him.

So if you are holding your own report for the first time, do not start with the index. Start with those two lines. They say more precisely what is happening in your case right now, and they are the lines a buyer quotes internally when he asks for approval.

Half of the mark is in your hands

This is where the subject turns practical. Creditreform publishes the weighting of the characteristics that feed the index. Not the formula, but the weights. And they are distributed very unevenly.

Read the first line again. A quarter of the entire mark is simply the question of how you pay your own invoices. Together with the credit opinion, which depends heavily on the same behaviour, that comes to fifty per cent.

An example from Creditreform's sample report makes it concrete. The report shows a company on index 227: good creditworthiness, probability of default 0.30%, credit limit 100,000 euro. In the schematic breakdown, payment behaviour and the credit opinion contribute 50 points each, so 100 of the 227 between them. The remaining ten characteristics account for 127 together. Had those two heavy characteristics each been rated one step worse, the company would sit in a different class, with every other figure completely unchanged.

That is the good news in an otherwise dry matter. You cannot do anything about your legal form, nor about how old your company is, and the sector risk was assigned to you in any case. But payment behaviour is a decision you take afresh every month, and on its own it outweighs legal form, company age and staff numbers combined.

Where the data comes from

Payment experiences are reported by your own suppliers. A firm that delivers on account has an interest in slow payers being visible to everyone else, so it passes its experience to the agency. This runs quietly in the background, without you being asked or involved, which is exactly why it surprises people.

Balance sheet strength comes from your published annual accounts. Capital companies lodge them with the Unternehmensregister, the German company register, and the deadline is one year after the balance sheet date (Section 325 HGB). Missing that deadline brings an administrative fine procedure under Section 335 HGB, and it also leaves the agency with nothing that could put your figures in a better light. Missing numbers rarely read as neutral. An agency that cannot see your accounts falls back on the sector, the legal form and the payment record, and those are blunter instruments.

The rest comes from public sources: the commercial register, the legal form, the date of incorporation. Creditreform's own assessment of the business fills what is left.

Step by step to your own index

1. Request the report. From the Creditreform branch responsible for your registered office. If you appear personally in the data as owner, shareholder or managing director, ask in the same letter for your Datenkopie, the copy of your personal data that Article 15 GDPR (Art. 15 DSGVO) gives you, free of charge and inside one month.
2. Go through the payment experiences. Check each reported experience on its own. Is the amount right? Is the date right? Was the invoice disputed at the time? A disputed claim must not be treated like an acknowledged one.
3. Check your filing. The company register shows publicly whether and when your last set of annual accounts arrived. It takes two minutes, and the answer catches owners out more often than you would expect.
4. Have wrong entries corrected. Article 16 GDPR covers incorrect information about you as a person. For reported claims the test sits in Section 31(2) BDSG (§ 31 Abs. 2 BDSG). The report holds up only if the claim had fallen due, if two reminders went out at least four weeks apart, if the report itself was announced beforehand, and if the claim is not disputed.
5. Pay your ten largest suppliers on time. Not all of them: the ten that report. This is the lever with the shortest reaction time.
6. Request the report again in six months. Payment behaviour feeds in continuously; the structural characteristics only move with the next set of accounts.

What FIAON takes on

Under a power of attorney, FIAON collects the company report in one pass, together with the owner report where you appear personally in the data. Every entry is then explained rather than merely listed: its source, how long it may stay on file, and whether the conditions for reporting it were ever met. Anything that looks challengeable is turned into a written correction, sent out and followed up until the deadlines have run. If you want it, preparation of a business card application follows on from there. Whether a card is issued, and with what limit, is the card company's call.

What does not work

Legitimate entries do not disappear because someone writes a well-worded letter. Where an open claim was reported by the book, the only route left is to pay it and let the deletion period run out. There is nothing more to it.

A new index cannot be calculated in advance either. The weighting is published, the formula is not. Anyone who tells you which figure you will hold after a particular step is guessing, however confidently it is put.

And no one can promise you which limit a supplier will grant. The business credit index is an input, not a decision. Limits are set by the supplier and credit is granted by the bank, each under their own rules, and neither publishes them.

The three sentences that matter

The Bonitätsindex runs from 100 to 600, and low is good. Half the mark consists of payment behaviour and the credit opinion, which means half of it consists of something you influence by paying on time and filing your annual accounts. Request your own file before a supplier calls to tell you what is in it.