Guide
A new LLC is a business with a birthday and almost no paper. Lenders know this: the floors that matter most — 12 months in business at several major lenders — cannot be argued with. What the first six months are for is making sure that when the business reaches those floors, its records are already clean, consistent, and reporting. Here is the order.
File the LLC with your state and choose the legal name you will use everywhere. Then get the EIN from irs.gov — free, and the letter (CP 575) arrives with the name as the IRS has it. If the name on the EIN letter differs from the state record, fix it now, while fixing is cheap. Every later record copies one of these two; a difference here reproduces everywhere.
Open business checking in the exact legal name, under the EIN. Run all income and expenses through it from day one. Lenders ask for months of business bank statements; statements in a personal account do not become business statements later, however carefully you annotate them.
A business phone in the business's name, listed in the 411 directory. A Google Business Profile with the same name, address, and phone. Request the D-U-N-S number free from Dun & Bradstreet — allow up to about 30 business days — and when the listing appears, correct its name and address to match your master records exactly.
Open the first supplier accounts. The rule from our main guide applies with full force to a new LLC: confirm in writing, with the vendor's credit team, that the account reports, and to which bureau, before buying for the sake of the file. Most suppliers do not report, vendors do not publish this reliably, and a new business has no cycles to waste on accounts that report nowhere. Pay early — on a thin file, every cycle is loud.
Add a second and third reporting account gradually. Keep every record consistent as things change — a new address or phone number has to be changed in seven places, not one. And understand what this period is not: no honest process produces a thick file in 30 days. The search phrase exists (“build business credit in 30 days”); the thing itself does not. What 30 days can produce is the complete foundation — records clean, file open, first cycles reporting — which is exactly what month 12 needs.
Do not pay thousands for a coaching program to tell you this sequence; it is the sequence on this page. Do not open personal cards in the business's name expecting them to build a business file. Do not apply at lenders whose published floors require 12 months and six figures of revenue in month 2 — the denial is free information you already had. And never let anyone suggest using a different EIN or a bought “aged” entity to look older: that is not a strategy, it is fraud, and it ends banking relationships.
The free checker on this site was built for exactly this moment: it audits a young business's records and lists what is missing, in screening order.
Two minutes, in your browser. The checker names each gap in screening order.