How We Research This Site

The first question for any reference site on a financial product category is: do we rank specific products? The answer here is no, and the reasoning matters enough to be the opening section of this page.

Why this site does not rank specific cards

Specific business-card terms (reward rates, sign-up bonuses, APRs, fees, qualifying thresholds for no-personal-guarantee products) change continuously. Visa and Mastercard publish updated interchange schedules twice a year (April and October), and issuer reward structures move in response. Sign-up bonuses are repriced quarterly or more often. APRs adjust with the prime rate and with issuer risk-pricing decisions. Card-agreement language, including reporting policies and arbitration provisions, is republished in the CFPB database quarterly.

A site that publishes current rates has to maintain them on a rolling basis. An affiliate-aggregator site funds that maintenance through the affiliate revenue earned on the click-through to apply. We do not have an editorial operation funded by affiliate clicks, and our business model is not aligned with the maintenance discipline a current-rates site requires.

The prior iteration of this site tried to publish specific card data (4x earning caps, sign-up bonuses, approval thresholds, no-PG qualifying revenue figures) without the operational infrastructure to maintain them. The data was either fabricated or stale, sometimes both. The 2026 audit flagged the site for rebuild on that basis.

The rebuild takes a different position. We serve the reader who is upstream of the product-choice decision: the new LLC owner, the freshly self-employed sole proprietor, the bookkeeper trying to understand the substantiation rules. For that reader, the structural education is the value: what is a personal guarantee, how does the CARD Act exclusion work, what does the IRS say about rewards, how do the three business credit bureaus differ. The structural education does not go stale.

For the downstream decision (which specific card, what current rates), we direct the reader to the CFPB card agreement database, which is the authoritative source updated quarterly by a regulator that has the operational mandate to keep it current. We do not duplicate that database; we point to it.

Primary sources we use

Every factual claim on this site cites one or more of the following primary sources:

Statute and regulation

• 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1601 et seq. (Truth in Lending Act)
• 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1603 (TILA business-purpose exclusion)
• Credit CARD Act of 2009, Public Law 111-24
• 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1691 et seq. (Equal Credit Opportunity Act)
• 12 C.F.R. Part 1002 (Regulation B)
• 12 C.F.R. Part 1026 (Regulation Z)
• 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1681 et seq. (Fair Credit Reporting Act)
• 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1692 et seq. (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act)
• 26 U.S.C. Sec. 162 and Sec. 163 (Internal Revenue Code, business expenses and interest)
• 16 C.F.R. Part 433 (FTC Holder Rule)
• Dodd-Frank Sec. 1071 (small-business data collection rule)

Federal agency publications

• CFPB consumer-facing explainer on personal guarantees for business credit cards
• CFPB Credit Card Agreement Database, consumerfinance.gov/credit-cards/agreements
• CFPB Data Point reports on credit-card late fees and related topics
• Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey, fedsmallbusiness.org
• Federal Reserve G.19 Consumer Credit release
• FRED commercial-bank credit-card interest rate series
• IRS Publication 535 (Business Expenses)
• IRS Publication 334 (Tax Guide for Small Business)
• IRS Publication 583 (Starting a Business and Keeping Records)
• IRS Publication 463 (Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses)
• IRS Publication 525 (Taxable and Non-Taxable Income)
• IRS Publication 1635 (Employer Identification Number)
• Rev. Rul. 76-96 (rebates as adjustments to purchase price)
• Treasury Regulations Sec. 1.163-8T (interest tracing)
• FTC Holder Rule, 16 C.F.R. Part 433

Tax Court and judicial

• Anikeev v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo 2021-23

Card networks

• Visa USA Interchange Reimbursement Fees, usa.visa.com (updated April and October)
• Mastercard U.S. Region Interchange Programs and Rates, mastercard.us (updated April and October)

Business credit bureaus

• Dun and Bradstreet PAYDEX scoring methodology (D&B published documentation)
• Experian Business Intelliscore Plus methodology
• Equifax Business Credit Risk Score and Business Failure Score methodology

Free credit reports

• AnnualCreditReport.com (FACTA Section 211 mandated source)

Update cadence

Every page on this site carries a "Last verified" date stamp. The current stamp is April 2026. Re-verification follows the publication cycle of the underlying primary sources:

• Visa and Mastercard interchange schedule updates: quarterly review (April and October releases)
• CFPB card agreement database updates: quarterly review
• Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey: annual review at publication
• IRS publication revisions: annual review
• Federal Reserve G.19 series: monthly check, structural change rare
• Statute and regulation changes: ad hoc review on enactment

A re-verification updates the date stamp on each affected page and revises any content that has changed in the underlying source. Where a primary source is no longer available at the cited URL, we update the citation to the new location or to the next-best authoritative source.

What we will and will not link to

We link to:

• Primary sources (statute, regulation, regulator publications, tax-court rulings)
• The CFPB card agreement database
• Network-level interchange schedules
• Business-bureau methodology documents
• FACTA-mandated free credit-report source
• Other Digital Signet reference sites in the small-business series, where editorially relevant

We do not link to:

• Affiliate-supported aggregator listicles ranking specific cards
• Issuer marketing pages (we are not in the affiliate-promotion business)
• Ranking services that we cannot independently verify

If we ever take affiliate relationships, we will disclose them specifically on the page where the relationship affects content. We currently take no affiliate revenue and have no affiliate links on educational pages.

How to submit a correction

If you find an error of fact, an outdated citation, or a primary source that has moved, send the correction to the contact channel listed on the FAQ page. We review correction submissions weekly and update affected pages on the next re-verification cycle, faster where the correction is material.

We particularly welcome corrections from professional users (CPAs, business attorneys, federal agency staff, regulatory specialists) who notice deviations from current primary-source language. The site is designed to be useful to the professional user as a quick-reference index, and that use case depends on accuracy.