Reliability
OnlyTons gives every organization a reliability band. It is not a star rating and nobody else can see it. It exists to answer one question the broker has to answer anyway — how much do we know about this operator, and how much does it support? — with a documented, updatable and checkable method instead of a judgement call.
This page is the published methodology. It is the artefact the platform commits to: the sources, the criteria, the weightings, how often it updates, who is responsible, and how you challenge it.
Nobody else ever sees your band. Not your counterparty, not another operator, not a visitor to the public pages. There is no screen anywhere in OnlyTons that shows one organization another organization's reliability. See Operator privacy.
The four bands
| Band | What it means | What changes for you |
|---|---|---|
| Preferred | A complete, checked file and a clean record | Nothing is restricted |
| Standard | The normal state for an active operator | Nothing is restricted |
| Restricted | We hold little, or something in the file needs attention | You can still list, browse and ask. A purchase proposal is sent as an expression of interest instead, and accepting terms or joining a deal is passed to a person first |
| Blocked | A serious indicator, confirmed by a person | Consequential actions are refused |
Being new is not being unreliable. A freshly registered organization that has filled in the setup wizard usually lands in Restricted, because there is almost nothing to go on yet — not because anything is wrong. Adding your VAT number and company registry number is normally enough to reach Standard the same day.
Listing is never restricted by your band. You can post supply, post requirements and offer land in every band except a confirmed Blocked. A weak signal moves you down an ordering; it does not take you off the market.
What is looked at
Seven criteria. Each has a weight out of 100, and the weights are published below rather than hidden.
| Criterion | Weight | What it reads |
|---|---|---|
| Identity verification | 20 | Whether the portal has verified your organization (Certifications & verification) |
| Documents and certifications | 20 | Active vs lapsed certifications, and whether the certificate document is on file |
| Company register | 15 | Whether you have supplied a VAT number and a registry number, and — if a check has been run — whether they match an active registration |
| Financial reliability | 15 | Reserved. No credit-scoring provider is in use, so this criterion currently applies to nobody |
| History on the portal | 15 | Finished deals: how many completed, and how many were cancelled after terms were agreed |
| Responsiveness | 10 | Requests forwarded to you, how many you answered, and how quickly |
| Profile completeness | 5 | How much of your organization profile is filled in |
The sources behind them
- Information you supply and we verify
- Public and company registers
- Certifications
- Documentary compliance (the documents behind the claims)
- Your history of transactions on the portal
- Professional business-information or credit-scoring services
Source 6 is not in use. When it is, it will be named here before it is used, and every lookup is recorded against your organization with the agreement it was made under.
Special-category data is never used. Health, ethnicity, religion, political opinions, trade-union membership and the like are not part of the method and cannot be recorded against an organization — the system has no field for them.
How the score is put together
- Each criterion is scored from 0 to 1 and multiplied by its weight.
- A criterion with no information is not scored zero. It is set aside and the remaining weights are scaled up. Not knowing something about you is never counted against you.
- Because of that, a second number is tracked: evidence strength. If we hold very little, your band is capped — you can reach Standard, but not Preferred, until there is something to be confident about. Your page says so explicitly when this is what is holding you.
- If two sources disagree, the criterion is scored on the more cautious reading, the evidence strength drops, and a person is asked to look at it.
- Serious indicators (a sanctions listing, an insolvency filing) do not add up with everything else. They end the calculation and propose a block.
Blocking is never automatic
The system cannot block your organization on its own. When a serious indicator is found:
- the score records the proposal, and a review is opened for a person with a 24-hour target;
- your band acts as Restricted, not Blocked, in the meantime;
- a block only takes effect once a person at OnlyTons confirms it, records why, and puts their name to it;
- you are notified.
Your rights
You can see the whole thing. My organization → Reliability shows your band, the score, the evidence strength, every criterion with its weight, what each one concluded, and what would improve it.
You can ask a person to look. Ask for a review opens a case with your own words attached. Target response: 3 working days.
You can correct a fact. Correct a fact is for when something we hold is simply wrong. Same 3-day target.
You are told when it goes against you. A band that moves down to Restricted or Blocked sends you a notification. A band that moves up does not — you do not need warning that things are fine.
Nothing is decided by a machine alone where it matters. The only fully automatic outcomes are Preferred, Standard and Restricted, none of which refuses anything outright. Every refusal has a person behind it.
How often it updates
- Immediately marked for recalculation when something relevant changes — a verification decision, a certification added or expired, a deal concluded, a request answered, your profile edited.
- Recalculated by a nightly sweep. Nothing recalculates while you wait.
- Recalculated at least monthly even if nothing changed, because some facts go stale by themselves — a certificate expires because time passed.
- Every organization's file is reviewed by a person at least twice a year.
Who is responsible
OnlyTons (the portal operator) is responsible for the method, for the result, and for correcting information that is wrong or out of date — including when a third-party service supplied it. A provider is never "the reason": if a lookup we commissioned is wrong, that is ours to fix.
Every third-party lookup is recorded with the date, the provider, what the agreement covers, and how long the answer is kept.
How long things are kept
| What | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Information the platform observes about you | 30 days, then re-derived |
| A figure supplied by a business-information provider | 90 days |
| The record of a decision taken about you | 7 years |
Expired information stops counting toward your score the moment it expires, whether or not it has been deleted yet, and is deleted by the nightly sweep.
Where reliability is used, and where it is not
Used: the broker's matching workspace ranks candidate suppliers partly on reliability, alongside window fit, price, quantity and region — and the broker can see every factor on screen.
Not used: search. Results in the finder are not ordered by anybody's reliability band. This is deliberate — a land listing belongs to one operator, so ordering land by reliability would be ordering operators, on a screen with no explanation attached to it.
Under the hood. The methodology is stored as a versioned row with a checksum,
not as a constant in the code, so a score can always be re-derived against the
exact criteria that produced it. Each stored score pins the criteria version, the
evaluator version, and a fingerprint of the evidence it read. See
llm-text/feature-plans/2026-08-07-agri-portal-s9-reliability-build.md.