Straight answers, including the awkward ones.

No. Most companies enter through one. They connect because the same numbers appear in all three and a lender compares them, but you can engage for tax alone, books alone, or credit alone.

Yes. We work with businesses in all 50 states. Business credit work carries no state licensing at all, and tax and accounting are handled remotely through the secure portal. Our office is in Atlanta; almost no client ever visits it.

Nothing. The assessment ends with a written view of where your business stands and whether we can help. If the answer is no, you will hear that.

After the assessment we send a written scope and fixed fee. Work begins once the engagement letter is signed and the first payment clears. For a notice with a deadline, say so on the call and we will tell you honestly whether we can meet it.

No. A commercial file sits with bureaus such as Dun & Bradstreet and is keyed to the business, not to a Social Security number. Strengthening it does not change your personal credit report.

Usually not. Most small-business lending still requires a personal guarantee whatever the commercial file says. Anyone selling a business credit file as a way to borrow without personal exposure is selling you a story you will sign for.

No, and nobody can. Dun & Bradstreet calculates its scores from data vendors report, and lenders decide on their own criteria.

No. Dun & Bradstreet issues it free and we do not resell or mark it up. Our fee covers the review, corrections, plan and monitoring around it.

No. We do not sell tradelines, do not use vendors that exist only to generate reporting, and do not place references your business has no commercial reason to hold.

No. It is our own internal 0–100 assessment across tax readiness, financial health, business credit, compliance and capital readiness. It is not PAYDEX, not a D&B rating, and no lender, supplier or bureau sees or uses it.

Online, by card or bank debit, through a hosted payment page linked from your invoice. Programme fees can be paid in one instalment or monthly. Monitoring is a monthly subscription you can cancel at any time.

Never before you approve a written scope. Fixed-fee work is invoiced on acceptance; subscriptions renew on the same day each month with a receipt emailed each time.

No. Card data never touches our systems. Payments run through a PCI-compliant processor that holds the card and returns us a token. We see the last four digits, the brand and the outcome.

If we have not started the work, yes, in full. Once a diagnostic has been delivered, fees cover work performed. Fees are never contingent on a score or a lending decision, so a disappointing bureau outcome is not a refundable event — which is exactly why we tell you before you buy whether the programme is worth it for your business.

No. Fixed-scope programmes end when the scope ends. Only monitoring recurs, and it shows the next charge date in your portal with a one-click cancel.

Not a single one. The United States has no comprehensive federal privacy law — ADPPA and the American Privacy Rights Act both stalled in Congress. Instead there is a patchwork: around twenty state comprehensive privacy laws in force with more enacted and coming, plus federal sector rules. For a tax firm the binding federal ones are the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the FTC Safeguards Rule, and Internal Revenue Code section 7216.

It depends on your state. Residents of states with comprehensive privacy laws generally have rights to access, correct, delete and port their personal data, and to opt out of sale, targeted advertising and certain profiling. We extend the same request process to every client regardless of state — it is simpler and it is the right default.

Not unless you specifically authorise it in writing, on a separate consent that meets the Internal Revenue Code section 7216 requirements. That consent is never a condition of your tax work, it is time-limited, and you can withdraw it. If you do not sign it, we simply do not use return information to decide what to offer you.

They stay in the encrypted portal, retained for the period professional and legal obligations require, then deleted. We do not accept tax documents by email.

No. We do not sell personal data, and we do not send client or return information to advertising platforms.

No. Client data is not used to train third-party models, and your tax return is never passed to a language model at all. There is one thing that is, and only if you choose it: if you paste the text of your own business credit report rather than typing the figures, that text is sent to a model to be read, with bank and card numbers, tax identification numbers, email addresses, telephone numbers and any bare run of nine or more digits stripped out first. Nothing it suggests is used until you confirm it, and you can skip the step entirely. Everywhere else, automated analysis operates on minimised, masked records.