About Slabmaster
Slabmaster is a Sydney-based importer of engineered stone slabs, supplying more than 200 stonemasons across the residential construction sector. It has been a CreditorWatch customer for three years.
Slabmaster operates in a fast-moving, high-risk industry with tight margins, variable payment behaviour and frequent insolvencies, the business needs reliable financial insights to ensure they can trade with confidence and keep cash flow secure.
“Once you’ve used CreditorWatch, you can’t live without it. The data is deep, the insights are accurate, and it gives us confidence in every credit decision.”
– Gavin, Managing Director at Slabmaster
The challenge
With customers ranging from small independent fabricators to larger commercial operators, Slabmaster makes numerous credit decisions every day. External data is one of the few reliable indicators of risk.
Slabmaster also monitors more than 100 suppliers to ensure they only pay deposits to financially stable businesses – a critical safeguard against supply chain disruption.
A high-risk industry demands deep, reliable data
Slabmaster operates in a market where:
- Customers often lack financial sophistication
- Insolvencies are common
- Margins are thin
- Payment behaviour is volatile
- Phoenixing and hidden liabilities are frequent
- Supplier failure can shut down operations overnight
Gavin, Slabmaster’s Managing Director, needed a data provider that could give him:
- Current, accurate credit risk data
- Alerts on adverse changes to customer information
- Visibility into ATO tax defaults
- Cross directorship insights to detect phoenixing
- A reliable, professional onboarding process
- A platform that could scale as the business grows
Exploring alternative credit reporting bureaus
Slabmaster briefly trialled another credit reporting bureau that claimed to offer similar functionality to CreditorWatch. While initially appealing on paper, the trial highlighted significant gaps in data, reporting depth and onboarding capability.
Within weeks, Slabmaster discovered significant data quality gaps, platform inaccuracies and operational risks that ultimately forced them to return to CreditorWatch.
The experience confirmed how essential high-quality data and a stable, mature platform are for Slabmaster’s risk management processes.
The return to CreditorWatch
Slabmaster returned to CreditorWatch because of the platform’s unmatched data depth, accurate risk signals and the confidence that comes from working with an experienced market leader.
Gavin found that key data signals his business relied on, were either “missing, unreliable or incomplete” on the competitor platform. The onboarding workflow was also “difficult for customers to use” and created friction, as well as delays and risk for his business.
Gavin highlighted several standout benefits:
- Industry-leading data quality – CreditorWatch’s risk scores, ATO tax default information, court actions, cross-directorships and payment insights provide the depth Slabmaster needs to assess customers confidently.
- Powerful alerts that drive real decisions – Email notifications for directorship changes, address updates, adverse events and score movements help Slabmaster proactively manage risk, often preventing overdue payments before they occur.
- ApplyEasy: A modern, reliable onboarding tool – CreditorWatch’s ApplyEasy onboarding solution delivers an intuitive, accurate, well-supported workflow that Slabmaster now plans to embed directly into its website.
- A trusted partner – Gavin emphasised the professionalism, expertise and continuity of the CreditorWatch team, noting the value of working with people who understand the industry and the product deeply.
The results
Since returning to CreditorWatch, Slabmaster has strengthened its credit decisioning, improved its onboarding process and gained greater visibility over both customers and suppliers. The business has avoided significant credit exposures, prevented potential bad debt events and improved its internal processes for guiding the sales team away from high risk credit applicants.