How scoring works

The rules engine: country, MCC, and NAICS matching, priority, and worst-tier-wins.

Every time Salescheck.io scores a company or deal — automatically from your CRM, or manually from the Score tester — it runs the same pipeline. This article walks through it end to end, so you know exactly why a given record came back Green, Yellow, Red, or Unknown.

What gets checked

Scoring runs against whatever data is actually available on the record — nothing is required:

country
MCC (merchant category code)
NAICS (industry classification code)
companyName
walletAddress / walletChain

A record with only a country filled in is still scored — just against country rules and any country-aware provider. A record with a country, an MCC, and a company name is checked against all three at once.

How candidate results are produced

Two kinds of checks run in parallel, and both feed into the same pool of candidate matches:

Your rules. Every rule whose type (country, MCC, or NAICS) has a value present on the record is checked. If the record's value matches the rule, that rule's risk category — and the color behind it — becomes a candidate result.
Connected 3rd-party providers. If a company name or wallet address is present and a provider is connected for that lookup type, the provider's signal (a sanctions hit, a PEP match, adverse media, wallet screening, and so on) is added as its own candidate result, with its own tier and reason.

Each candidate carries a tier (Green, Yellow, or Red) and a reason string explaining why it fired.

Worst tier wins

Salescheck.io doesn't average or prioritize one signal over another. It takes every candidate match — across country, MCC, NAICS, and every provider — and the single worst tier among them becomes the final result. One Red match anywhere is enough to make the whole record Red, no matter how many Green or Yellow signals also fired.

If nothing matches anything — the record has data, but none of it hits a rule or a provider signal — the result is Green by default, not Unknown. Unknown is reserved for records with no checkable data at all. See Why a score comes back Unknown.

What a result contains

Every score returns three things:

Tier — the final, worst-of-all-matches color (or Unknown).
Reason — the reason text from whichever match(es) produced the worst tier. If more than one match landed on that same worst tier, their reasons are joined together so nothing is hidden.
Matches — the full list of everything that was checked and what it found, including matches that didn't end up being the worst one. This is what shows up in the Audit log for every score ever produced.

Worked example

A company based in a country you've tagged Yellow, operating under an MCC you've tagged Red:

Check	Match	Tier	Reason
Country rule	Country = a jurisdiction on your medium-risk list	Yellow	"Elevated jurisdiction — enhanced due diligence"
MCC rule	MCC 7995 (gambling)	Red	"Gambling MCC — prohibited category per policy"

Two candidates fired: one Yellow, one Red. The worst tier is Red, so the final result is Red, with the reason "Gambling MCC — prohibited category per policy" — the Yellow country match still shows up in the match list, but it doesn't drive the reason shown, because it wasn't the worst one.

Still stuck? Email support@salescheck.io.