What a company credit check actually shows

A company credit check returns less than most people expect, and the gaps matter more than the contents. Knowing which questions a check can answer — and which it structurally cannot — is what separates a useful check from a box-ticking one.

What is always available, and free

New Zealand has an unusually open company register. For any registered company you can see, at no cost:

• Registered legal name, NZBN, and company number
• Status — registered, in liquidation, in receivership, or removed
• Incorporation date and the full history of previous names
• Registered office and address for service
• Current directors and shareholders

This is identity, not risk. It confirms who you are dealing with, which matters enormously — but a company can be perfectly clean on every one of these fields and still be 90 days behind with every supplier it has.

What a traditional credit file adds

Bureau files layer on public adverse events: court judgments, formally registered defaults, insolvency notices. These are genuinely serious signals. The problem is timing.

Every one of those events is the end of a process, not the start. A judgment means a supplier already invoiced, already chased, already gave up chasing, already instructed a lawyer, and already went to court. That sequence takes months, often more than a year. The company was a bad risk the whole time and the file said nothing.

This is the structural gap: adverse-event data is accurate and almost always too late to help you.

What payment behaviour adds

Payment behaviour is the record of when invoices actually get paid relative to when they were due. It is the earliest widely available signal, because a company under pressure stretches its creditors long before anyone takes it to court.

Read three things, not one:

• The median days late — the typical experience of supplying this company, unmoved by one catastrophic invoice
• The spread — whether everyone gets paid at a similar delay, or whether some suppliers are being singled out for the long tail
• The trend — the direction over recent quarters, which is the part that actually predicts anything

A company sitting steadily at 10 days late for three years is a predictable, budgetable customer. A company that was at 2 days late last year and is at 30 days late now is the one to worry about, even though its absolute number is still unremarkable.

What a check cannot show you

Being clear about the limits is what stops a check being misused:

• Solvency. Nothing here is a balance sheet. Private NZ companies do not file public accounts, so no check can tell you whether a company can pay — only whether it does
• Intent. Late payment can mean cash-flow distress, or simply a finance team that runs one payment cycle a month. The number does not tell you which
• Sole traders and partnerships. They are not on the Companies Register, so there is no company to check. On PaidWell they are never the subject of a report
• Very new or very small relationships. PaidWell suppresses payment metrics until at least three independent suppliers and five invoices agree, because below that threshold a metric would identify the contributor. A blank metric means “not enough data”, never “pays fine”

How to combine them

Use identity data to be certain who you are contracting with. Use adverse events as a hard stop. Use payment behaviour to set the limit and the review date. No single layer is sufficient, and the middle layer is the one most likely to be silent when you need it.

The step-by-step version of this is in how to credit check an NZ company.

A note on what this is not

PaidWell is an information service, not a credit bureau, and nothing here is credit advice. A report is one input into a commercial decision that remains yours.