Cost And Effect

Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), with the world's largest business information database, tracks 47 million companies worldwide--11 million in the United States alone. Businesses use D&B's services to find new customers and evaluate their creditworthiness, identify potential suppliers, and collect overdue receivables.

Through face-to-face and telephone interviews and public records searches, more than 200 million financial transactions are added to D&B's files annually, and that's just in the United States. D&B updates its information base continually--more than 960,000 times each business day.

When businesses are entered into the D&B database, they are issued D&B D-U-N-S Numbers (comparable to Social Security numbers for companies). Required by the U.S. government for all businesses in its Central Contractor Registration database and used by the United Nations and the European Union, the D&B D-U-N-S Number is quickly becoming the universal standard for identifying businesses on the World Wide Web as well.

To have a D&B D-U-N-S Number assigned to your business free of charge, call (800) 234-3867.

This article was originally published in the January 1998 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Cost And Effect.