What to Do After Incorporating or Forming an LLC
After you create a legal entity by either incorporating (C or S corporations) or forming an LLC, it’s important to know what to do next. Some states have extra requirements after you’ve completed all of the paperwork for your legal entity to become activated, and depending on the type of legal entity you chose you’ll want to make sure you’ve setup your bylaws or operating agreement.
Regardless of where your business is located, it’s important to know how to start operating with your new entity at the front of your processes. Registering your business with a trusted partner can take away the worry that often comes with the laws and requirements being different in every state. However, below we’ll briefly cover the things to think about when you’re registering your business by yourself.
What Every Business Should Do After Legal Formation
After you’ve completed all of the paperwork and filed it with your state, both corporations and LLC have a few similar steps that everyone needs to think about. Next, we list out the ones that every single business should keep in mind as you start operating under your new legal entity.
Open a Business Bank Account
One of the best protections a legal entity can provide you personally, as the business owner, is the separation of business assets and personal assets. This financially helps keep you and your personal property safe from any poor business performance. In order to fully protect your personal assets, you’ll need to make sure that your finances aren’t mixed with your business finances at all.
Creating a business bank account allows you to easily pay your bills and know how much cash your business has on hand at any given time. It’s a good idea to immediately open a business bank account as soon as you have all of the legally required paperwork. This includes both the registration of your business with your state and typically your federal employer ID number.
Obtain Your Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN)
Your federal employer identification number, or your federal tax identification number, is a unique nine digit number given to you by the IRS. This gives the government an opportunity to know who you are when you pay taxes and pay your employees. This is a requirement to obtain if you have and pay any employees at all, including yourself (unless you pay yourself only through profit distributions).
You can apply online through the IRS website, via fax, or by mail. If you’re an international business owner you can apply via telephone during specific times. The responsible party for each business looking to obtain a FEIN must be an individual and not another legal business entity.
Setup Business Payroll
If you have employees, you should setup your business payroll quickly upon receiving your federal employer identification number. You don’t want to get behind paying employees and you also don’t want to personally pay anyone out of your own account once you’ve incorporated or filed the paperwork for your LLC. You don’t want to give any reason to believe your personal and business assets should be mixed together.
Setting up business payroll can be done a number of different ways but we recommend finding a software that you like and using it to help you through the process. Various software products will do all the payroll calculations and tax filings on your behalf so that you don’t have to add another headache to your business operations.
Notify All Business Partners of Your Legal Entity Change
If you’ve been operating under a partnership then you’ll need to make sure every single partner receives written notification of the change of your business’s legal status. This should include copies of all the paperwork, showing exactly what it means for each partner and how much of the new business everyone owns.
Start Operating Your Business
Now that you’ve legally formed your business, it’s time to start operating with your legal name or DBA (a name you’ve registered with your state for “doing business as”)! All of your practices moving forward should take into account the fact that you’ve now registered your business.
This will mean something different for every business but outside of the clear financial changes (such as operating from a business bank account), your business may need to change the name you’re using on all communications. Your state may have unique rules that you’ll need to be aware of before operating your business so that you stay compliant, so it’s likely best to check with an attorney or a partner who specializes in business formations.
What to Do After Incorporating
If you’ve formed an S or C corporation, then your requirements after you incorporate differ slightly from other business types. The things that these types of businesses will need to do after they file include:
- Review Incorporation Documents: Make sure everything you’ve filed was inputted and filed correctly. You don’t want to rely on information that wasn’t included in your incorporation documents.
- Make Sure You’ve Completed All Steps: Some states might require additional steps to make your incorporation complete. Make sure you fully understand what those requirements are, or if your state even has any.
- Create a Corporate Minute Book: Keeping meticulous records will be very important for your business moving forward. This starts with keeping minutes of each board meeting, which can be kept inside of your new corporate minute book.
- Hold an Organizational Meeting: You need to hold your first organization meeting to formally announce the business structure and to adopt bylaws, which is an important step to finalize your incorporation.
- Adopt Bylaws: Adopting bylaws by which the business will operate is a legal requirement for all corporations. These will become important as the business operates moving forward and none of these should be taken lightly.
- Issue Shares of Stock: Ownership in corporations is given via the issuance of shares of stock. When you incorporate you need to decide how many shares the business has (you can create more in the future) and who owns how many shares, based on the percentage of ownership each person or entity has in the business.
What to Do After Forming Your LLC
Forming an LLC is a bit different than incorporating. If you’ve created an LLC, then it’s important to do these things after you’ve finalized the paperwork with your secretary of state’s office:
- Review LLC Documents: This is similar to incorporating, but you need to make sure that all of your paperwork was completed correctly and that you understand what it all means.
- Make Sure You’ve Completed All Requirements: When you form an LLC your state may have requirements to finalize your formation and make it legally valid. For example, some states require you to make a public post in a local newspaper that your business has been formed. Make sure you fully read your state’s requirements after you form your LLC to make sure you’ve abided by all requirements.
- Create an LLC Minute Book: Formally documenting everything that happens in your business, or at least your big decisions, will be important moving forward. This is especially important if your business has multiple owners. The difference from a corporation is that LLC’s are not legally required to hold annual meetings and keep minutes. It’s still a good idea to organize the decisions of the business though.
- Hold an Organizational Meeting: Every new business should have an initial meeting to layout the organizational structure of the business. For an LLC, this is a good time to adopt an operating agreement.
- Adopt an Operating Agreement: Most LLCs will be required to draft and execute an operating agreement which the business will live by. Check out our article to understand the differences between an operating agreement and corporate bylaws.
This is a pretty inclusive list of all the things you should be thinking about to either finalize the formation of your business or to start operating after your legal paperwork is complete. Using a service, like ours, takes a lot of this out of your mind because we provide the information and packages necessary to get all of the requirements out of the way. Register your business with us today and we’ll provide the peace of mind that your work is being fully completed!
Frequently Asked Questions After Incorporating or Forming an LLC
You may have more specific questions about whether or not you should do something after incorporating or forming your LLC. We’ve put together a nice list that’s inclusive of pretty much anything that you might be thinking about, which is relative to this type of activity. Check out our frequently asked questions if you don’t see the answer you’re looking for in this article.