If you’re a leader at a B2B company, you’re probably all too familiar with a painful bottleneck: Your sales team is closing deals, but manual credit approvals are killing the momentum.
And the impact of this can be felt across the business. Lost revenue, weak loyalty, and slower growth are just a few pitfalls that accompany the slow-moving, manual credit approvals that often come with B2B commerce.
The solution isn’t more headcount or faster manual processes—it’s automation.
Trade credit automation handles the entire workflow digitally: onboarding, fraud checks, credit approvals, financial analysis. Instead of days (or even weeks) of back-and-forth, you can assess buyer applications quickly enough to offer them the right relationship type instantly, whether that’s cash upfront or 180 days to pay. Without trade credit, you can’t offer payment terms. Without payment terms, you’ll lose business.
For companies like Jones Heartz Building Supply and CALI Floors, automated trade credit approvals have led to outcomes like an 80% reduction in credit approval time; fully digitized workflows; auto-collected tax documents; and integrated trade, credit, and bank data all in one dashboard.
Sound too good to be true?
Here’s what you need to know about how to do it for your business.
Why is trade credit important?
We all know trade credit is an important factor to consider when it comes to B2B sales, but why should making the process of assessing trade credit be a business priority for sellers?
Well, the numbers don’t lie: Allianz Trade wrote that merchants who offer deferred payment options have seen up to a 40% increase in conversion rates.
To summarize, trade credit:
- Builds trust: It signals that the buyer is known, vetted, and valued.
- Boosts conversion: When terms are available, high-value buyers are more likely to complete checkout.
- Drives bigger orders: Buyers purchase more when they don’t have to pay upfront.
- Enables recurring revenue: Stable, long-term commercial relationships depend on flexible payment terms.
- Creates competitive advantage: If you don’t offer terms, qualified buyers will move on to a supplier who does.
Without trade credit, you’re either betting on customers who aren’t verified to pay you when they say they will or you’re playing it safe and losing out on business to companies who can offer more favorable terms.
What is B2B trade credit automation?
At Jones Heartz Building Supply, manual credit approvals were a problem the team knew well: “We were pulling credit reports manually and piecing together write-ups. Approvals would take four to five days,” their Director of Finance Ron Fogel told Nuvo.
B2B trade credit automation is essentially the opposite of that.
Instead of pulling reports, chasing down bank and trade references, manually analyzing the credit, and staying on top of various communication channels, B2B trade credit automation helps the folks in charge of vetting potential business partners’ credit streamline the various workflows into one, seamless process.
Far too often, core risk functions exist outside of businesses’ e-commerce platforms. This leads to a fundamental misalignment between the speed of digital commerce and manual approvals—and buyers can feel that. This breakdown between your storefront and approvals process not only creates friction for your buyer, it also compromises risk functions like fraud prevention, credit risk assessment, and tax compliance.
Not to mention, a one-week approval delay equals two percent of the year lost to stalled decisions—a direct hit to growth.
The implications of this can be felt across the business.
The problem: Trade credit workflows are stuck in the past
Since the Sumerians were literally carving IOUs into clay tablets 4,000 years ago, credit workflows have been manual. But these offline workflows don’t complement their online counterparts and have severe consequences. Let’s review what a typical process looks like for B2B companies that sell physical goods:
1. Buyers submit a business credit application via PDF or sent over email, then wait as finance completes a manual review. All the while, momentum disappears, intent lowers.
2. Decentralized bureau reports and manual reference checks leave credit teams spending time to acquire hard data.
3. Your credit platforms, plus your ERP and CRM don’t share verified data, leaving teams spending hours reconciling all of the data you do find.
4. Synthetic identities, near-match domains, and fake entities pass manual checks, leaving you vulnerable to fraud.
These kinds of manual credit workflows are completely incongruous with today’s digital-first commerce environment, and these gaps ultimately hurt revenue, data quality, and trust.
So how can you rely on trade credit to win business without getting bogged down in tedious, manual work? Automated credit workflows.
The solution: Best-in-class businesses are relying on trade credit automation
“It’s all right there: no email chains, no chasing, no big customer folders with documents attached. We make credit decisions in under 48 hours,” Dexter Morrison, CALI Floors’ Credit and AR Manager, told Nuvo after automating and centralizing their credit operations.
Using a platform like Nuvo, companies like CALI Floors are reaping the rewards of a system that actually works with their businesses, not against them.
Here’s how automated trade credit analysis works with Nuvo:
- Choose what matters most to your analysis process, whether you’re looking for bureau reports, financial insights, trade references, or all of the above.
- Build a scorecard with elements like auto-matched credit reports; integrations to all major bureaus; and real-time bank balance information to get instant insights into your buyers.
- Assess applicants based on information like bank balance, credit score, and personal guarantee verifications so key stakeholders can review.
- Review a decisioning queue that has a pre-set and configurable review portal plus key information like sales rep information and application status. Take advantage of user assignments, automated notifications, and action queues to make collaboration between Sales and Finance seamless.
Then, reap the rewards of an automated trade credit approvals system: “If you’ve experienced the best, it’s hard to settle for less. Using Nuvo is like upgrading from a Prius to a $300,000 car. You’re not going back,” Morrison from CALI Floors said. The business impact is immense, and here are just a few of the benefits automated trade credit workflows provide:
Real-time verification: Buyers verify business identity, principals, and bank accounts inside the flow.
Automated approvals: Low-risk buyers get instant terms, boosting conversion.
Stronger fraud controls: Identity checks, licensing data, address verification, and corporate registry matching stop fraud early.
Unified customer profiles: You get clean, verified records to sync across all of your systems (ERP, CRM, and more).
Continuous monitoring: Bank, bureau, and A/R signals refresh automatically so risk shifts are caught early.
Turn trade credit into a business growth driver
The companies making the shift from manual to automated trade credit workflows are seeing tangible results. They’re improving decision speed, increasing visibility into risk, bringing their systems together instead of cobbling together solutions.
But the real impact goes beyond just operational efficiency:
Revenue acceleration: When qualified buyers get instant terms instead of waiting days for approval, conversion rates jump. Remember, 48% of B2B buyers abandon carts when net terms aren’t available—automation captures that lost revenue.
Competitive advantage: While your competitors are still pulling credit reports manually and piecing together write-ups, you’re approving customers in real-time. That speed difference wins deals.
Fraud protection at scale: Synthetic identity screening, domain verification, and corporate registry matching catch threats that slip through manual reviews. You can say “yes” to more customers because you’re better at catching the bad ones.
Data that actually works: Instead of scattered spreadsheets and email chains, you get unified customer profiles that update across all of your systems. Your sales team knows credit status, finance sees order history, and operations can plan inventory—all from the same verified data.
Ready to move from manual approvals to automated growth? Nuvo embeds real-time verification, instant decisioning, and continuous monitoring directly into your digital buying experience
