A score out of one hundred from verified job history, refused when there is no history to score.
Costing and commercial control. 5 questions answered below, each with the arithmetic behind it and the limits of what the tool decides. Open the Contractor Credit Check tool.
A credit score is an inference about whether someone will pay, and any honest version of it has to say what it is built from. This tool builds one from payment history, references and the record of work completed, and it refuses to produce a score when there is not enough history to support one. That refusal is the design. A contractor with no record is not a bad risk, they are an unknown one, and a score of zero would say otherwise. The tool reports the missing history as missing, so a decision to extend credit or award a subcontract rests on evidence rather than on a number that was invented to fill a gap.
A subcontractor with eight completed jobs, six paid on time and two late, and two verified references, scores in a middle band with the late payments as the main deduction. A second subcontractor with three jobs and no references is not scored at all, because there is not enough history to place them. The first can improve by settling on time and by having references verified; the second needs a longer record before any inference is fair.
From recorded evidence: payment history, completed work and verified references, each with a stated weight. The weights are visible, so a score can be interrogated rather than accepted, and the evidence sits beside it. Where the evidence is thin, the tool declines to score rather than producing a number that would look like knowledge it does not have.
It reports them as unscored with the reason stated. A contractor with three completed jobs and no references is an unknown, and the honest treatment of an unknown is to say so. Scoring them low would wrongly imply a negative record, and scoring them high would be inventing one.
From the records you hold and the references that have been checked. The tool does not access credit files or public registers, so the quality of a score depends on the quality of the evidence behind it. That is a limitation worth stating plainly, because a score that appears authoritative invites a decision that the evidence may not support.
Contractors assessing a subcontractor, clients assessing a main contractor, and suppliers assessing a trade account. In each case the score is one input to a decision that also involves the size of the commitment, the payment terms and the security available. It is most useful as a structured way to look at evidence that would otherwise be assembled by impression, and as a record that the evidence was considered before the commitment was made.
No. A low score means the evidence is thin or the record is patchy, and that calls for a different arrangement rather than an automatic refusal: staged payments, a guarantee, a smaller first package. The score is information, and treating it as a verdict would be using it for something it cannot support. A subcontractor with a patchy record on a small package may be a perfectly sound choice, and one with a clean record may be over committed elsewhere.