A Call Says You Must Pay for a DUNS Number

The call comes a few weeks after you form your LLC. A friendly voice says your company has no D-U-N-S Number yet. Lenders will not take you seriously, it says, until you buy a package that sets one up.

What the number is

Think of it as a name tag for your company. Nine digits long, and no person gets one. Once you have it, your firm sits on file at Dun & Bradstreet, where a stranger can see you are open for business.

An LLC qualifies. So does a partnership. Two shops in two towns? Each shop gets its own tag, D&B says.

What it costs

Zero dollars. D&B is plain on this. Nothing you buy from them, now or later, is a condition of having one.

So the package on the phone is something else. It may be a real product. It is not the price of the number.

Look before you apply

You may have one already. D&B has a lookup tool to check. You only ever get one. It stays put for life, through a sale and even after the doors close. A partner or an old owner may have set it up years ago.

Do you need one?

No. D&B says nothing makes a company get one. Federal contract work does not call for it either, D&B says. Federal awards go through SAM.gov, which gives out its own Unique Entity ID when you sign up.

So what does the number do? It puts your business where others can find it. D&B says groups may use it to look at a business credit profile.

Keep the record right

Once you have the number, the record behind it matters more. A private U.S. company can open its own record and send in fixes, with no bill, using a D&B tool built for that. Each fix gets checked before it goes live.

Look up your listing. Read it line by line. Fix what is out of date. That costs nothing either. Your personal file deserves the same look, and a wrong account on your credit report can be disputed for free.