Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), with the world's largest
business information database, tracks 49 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
annually to D&B's files in the United States alone. D&B
updates its information base continually-more than 750,000 times
each business day.
When businesses are entered into the D&B database, they are
issued D-U-N-S numbers (similar to Social Security numbers for
companies). The U.S. federal government requires companies to have
this number to bid for government contracts. Also 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.
For more information about D&B, call (800) 234-3867 or visit
the D&B Web site at www.dnb.com. To register for a D-U-N-S
number, call (800) 333-0505.
This article was originally published in the June 1998 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Fast Lane.
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