D&B collects data from their customers who subscribe to their services.
For instance, if I subscribe to their service, I can run a report on my biggest customer ACME Corp. Hypothetically I move 2million dollars a month with ACME and they owe me a bunch of money every month. I pay $300 more or less for a report from D&B which shows ACME's information including their incorporation structure, PPSA filings, any proceedings in court. Those things are public knowledge, and you can get it from your lawyer too.
D&B also gives you their information collected from other customers in respect to ACME's payables. Because I am a customer of D&B I send my monthly report of all the entities that I do business with and the number of days outstanding each of these customers are at. Basically it is vendor DUNS Number, dollars current, dollars 30-60, dollars 60-90, dollars over 90. This information gets collected and is part of the package. From this you will see if ACME is slowly getting behind overall because my information gets added to the information from banks, credit cards, utility companies, factoring companies, and other large vendors of ACME etc. This is how a credit score is made up and you can see this score in Load Link under D&B. Ideally you run this report regularly and you can spot a negative trend early to make decisions before they stretch out your receivables past 90 days.
The problem, as
@loaders mentioned, is that the information is collected from a number of sources and is always subject to interpretation. In Load Link, the D&B score is usually based of very little information. If one entity reports for a specific entity and that one report is skewed because of a disagreement on one invoice, then it may show that they are 99+ days to pay when in reality it could be only $100.
I know that most large entities utilize D&B as part of their credit management routine.
