Methodology

How we build credit intelligence from public records.

Every TraceComp profile is built from official, verifiable public sources — registries, court records, regulators, and stock exchanges. Here is how the data flows into your company report.

1. Data collection

We ingest official open registries — free, complete national sources — for every covered market. For each country we maintain a primary registry source (e.g. Companies House for the UK, INSEE Sirene for France, ASIC for Australia, and the Receita Federal CNPJ base for Brazil) plus secondary sources for financial statements, insolvency notices, and beneficial ownership. Every data point is tagged with its source.

2. Normalization & merge

Records from multiple sources are merged using the registration number as the canonical key. When a field is missing in one source but present in another, we keep the populated version. We never overwrite a non-empty field with an empty one — staleness is preferred to data loss. Every merge is traced via the source_ids field of the company profile so you can see where each value came from.

3. TraceComp score

The TraceComp score (0–100) is composed of five weighted factors:

  • Financial health (30 pts): current ratio, debt-to-equity, profit margin, revenue trend, and Altman Z-Score.
  • Payment behavior (20 pts): trade payables vs revenue, short-term debt dynamics, third-party signals where available.
  • Legal risk (20 pts): court proceedings, liens, frequency of officer or capital changes.
  • Business stability (15 pts): age, continuity of filings, management stability.
  • Data quality (15 pts): completeness, freshness, number of cross-validating sources.

Scores are mapped to labels: 90+ A+, 80–89 A, 70–79 B+, 60–69 B, 50–59 C, 30–49 D, < 30 F.

4. Altman Z-Score for private companies

For private companies, we use the Altman Z' formula: Z' = 0.717 · WC/TA + 0.847 · RE/TA + 3.107 · EBIT/TA + 0.420 · BV(E)/TL + 0.998 · Sales/TA. Zones: Z' > 2.9 = safe, 1.23–2.9 = grey, < 1.23 = distress. We flag distress with critical severity in the risk-signals section of the company profile.

5. Limits and disclaimers

TraceComp data is sourced from public records and may lag the registry of record by days or weeks. Coverage spans 13 fully-loaded jurisdictions today — including the UK, France, Australia, Germany, and Brazil — and grows as we onboard new free, complete registers. Our score is a decision-support tool, not investment advice — always verify critical decisions with primary sources and qualified advisors.

See also: Data Sources · About TraceComp