The rating of the creditworthiness of companies on the basis of the Basel-II-criteria continues to divide small and medium-sized companies. The reason for this disagreement seems to be the sober subject of costs, but what the disagreement really reflects is the antagonism of the two business decision making philosophies – guts vs. head. Especially among SME many entrepreneurs trust their feeling from the guts when making a decision. Rating, however, requires an unemotional, matter-of-fact analysis, something which up to know has been the approach chosen exclusively by major enterprises only.
The fact is that many growing SME break down exactly at a point in time when their market activities as well as their business structures cannot be handled with the guts feeling any more and things start getting out of control. As a rule, this happens when companies have reached a size of between 100 and 500 employees or set up more than three agencies.
Whoever is aware of this limit will realise the opportunity provided by rating in order to overcome this critical period in time. In contrast to what can often be heard from the discussion, it is in particular smaller companies with high growth potential which highly benefit from rating. However, this will only be the case, if for the rating tools are used which provide data suitable for everyday business operations. It is true that E-Business-systems such as e.g. those from Oracle are more expensive than those tools which are exclusively tailored to the rating requirements, but when selecting the rating tools the requirements of everyday operations should be given priority over the wish to hold rating costs as low as possible. 