Salescheck.ioHelp CenterUnderstanding risk tiers
What Green, Yellow, Red, and Unknown mean, and how the final verdict is produced.
The default tiers
Out of the box, every score comes back as one of four results:
- Green - no matching rule or signal indicated risk. This means nothing was flagged, not that the company has been positively verified as safe.
- Yellow - at least one rule or signal flagged something worth a second look, but nothing severe enough to block.
- Red - at least one rule or signal flagged high risk, such as a sanctioned country or a prohibited industry.
- Unknown - there wasn't enough base data (no country and no MCC) to evaluate any rule at all, so no verdict could be produced.
Worst tier wins
A single lookup can involve several rules and, on Premium, several connected 3rd-party providers, all evaluated at once. Salescheck.io doesn't average or pick one source as authoritative - it takes the single worst tier out of everything that matched, and that becomes the final verdict.
For example:
| Signal | Result |
|---|---|
| Country rule | Green |
| MCC rule | Red |
| Final verdict | Red |
Here, the country looked fine on its own, but the merchant category code matched a rule mapped to Red. Because Red is worse than Green, Red wins - even though only one of the two rules fired at that level.
The same logic applies to 3rd-party signals: if ComplyAdvantage flags a sanctions hit while your own country and MCC rules both come back Green, the final result is still whatever tier that sanctions hit maps to.
When you'll see Unknown
Unknown isn't a risk tier you configure - it's a built-in result Salescheck.io returns when there isn't enough information to run any rule. Specifically, this happens when a record is missing both a country and an MCC. Without at least one of those, there's nothing for a country, MCC, or NAICS rule to match against.
For a full breakdown of common causes and how to fix them, see Unknown score results.