How To Request A Credit Bureau Pull

Collect! currently has features to take a file containing credit bureau reports and import them to the appropriate debtor. It is required that you have the process in place to receive the file of requested credit bureau reports.

If you are beginning this process of requesting the credit bureau reports, your search can take you to a variety of methods.

Third Party Products

There are a number of third party products such as SmartAlex and Quickbooks that have advanced features designed solely for credit bureau reporting information. With these products, users may request an instant credit bureau report on an individual, or schedule a batch of requests. These products have the ability to handle electronic request requirements, connect to the necessary resource, and receive either the credit bureau report on the user's screen, or pick up the return file for a batch of credit bureau reports. You can continue using these products by supplying the correct file number that Collect! uses for the account in the appropriate data field used by the third party program. When the information is received, Collect! will use the file number when importing and attaching each credit report. This requires double entry of information into both your third party product and Collect!.

Many of these programs have the ability to import data into their own database. So you can use Collect! to produce the information in a format that this third party software can import. Then the double entry is automated and you eliminate the chances of typos.

These programs have format specifications for the information needed. Provide these specifications to our support team and we can prepare the data in the format required.

Credit Bureau Utilities

Most companies acting as a credit bureau reporting service sell or supply their own software to pull a credit report individually, or by batch. If you intend to use Collect! to report to credit bureaus, then you will need to make a commitment to one of these services. When doing so, ask them about requesting credit bureau reports to see what they offer for ease of use and cost effectiveness. These services have specifications for sending the information to satisfy the request.

Web Services

There are many new Web Services for requesting a credit bureau report. Usually, this is done through a Submit form on the Internet, by filling out the necessary information and submitting it. The returned HTML page can be saved and then attached to the debtor. This works well for single requests but does not handle multiple requests very smoothly.

Whatever means is used, the basic point is that a product or service receives request information from you electronically and a file is prepared and made available for you to pick up, display, or print.

The Credit Bureau will require you to place a file, in a specific file format, in a location and will inform you of a location where you can download the results of your request.

Credit Report Requests Using Collect!

If you have the exact specifications for the file, you can use Collect! to make these credit report requests. Then you would only require the steps needed to get the file to your service. This eliminates the middle man.

There are many ways that this can be accomplished. To illustrate a simple example, while a user is on a debtor, you would run a contact plan to:

1. Write a note "Credit Bureau Report requested."
2. Changes the status to CBP (to signify credit bureau pull).
3. Create a contact of Type OTHER with the Due Date set to today's date and the Description "Request Credit Bureau Report."

Repeat this for the next debtor. You may also select a number of debtors and run a batch process to run this contact plan on each one of them. This will give you the same results on any number of accounts.

Requesting in batches is far more efficient and eliminates the time that it takes to deliver a single request at a time.

The next step would be to run a report at end of day, end of week, or what ever time you wish. The report would search the database for a contact created by the CBP contact plan. When one is found, Collect! would then append to a file, the debtor's information in the required format. Once this is done, Collect! can mark the contact as done and repeat the steps until there are no more contacts found.

The last step would be for you to locate the file Collect! created and send it to the service according to their instructions.

The process is complete. When you receive a file from your service with the batch of credit bureau reports, follow the steps to import and attach these to the correct debtor account. Please refer to How To Use Attachments for details. This requires that you have Collect!'s Import/Export module.