Corporate services describe a wide range of principles and practices that consolidate your compliance and legal documentation. Starting a business, organizing entity management, using a corporate agent, or looking for legal corporate services all fit under the umbrella of business corporate services. Your goal should be to group those services together so that nothing gets lost in the shuffle.
Automating your documentation management ensures reports are always up-to-date, giving your executives convenient across to important information. Additionally, having a corporate services provider handle legal services, such as mergers, dissolutions, DBAs, and reinstatements, can drastically improve your agility and efficiency.
At Fully Accountable, we believe that companies should have access to all of their corporate services with one provider. As a corporate services company, we can simplify your documentation, compliance, and legal services and help you navigate the challenges of running a business.
Steps to Forming a Business
Forming a business isn’t a simple matter of declaration. There are numerous steps you have to complete. While the following list is by no means exhaustive, it provides an overview of some of the basic steps to forming a business. Depending on the type of business you plan to start, you might have to complete more steps to comply with state-specific requirements.
- Conduct market research
- Create a business plan
- Apply for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) if applicable
- Select the type of business you want to become (LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp)
- Choose your tax year
- Have your employees fill out Form I-9 and Form W-4
- Pay your business taxes
- Apply for business licenses and permits
- Protect your business with insurance
- Set up a business bank account
How Do Corporate Services Help With Company Formation?
Reduced Risk of Company Formation Errors
New businesses are more likely to let information slip through the cracks, as business practices haven’t settled in yet. Hiring a corporate services team to help with company formation can allay those growing pains. A corporate services provider can standardize your compliance as you form your business to ensure nothing gets lost in the shuffle.
If you’re trying to form a business, it’s easy to overlook a few of the principle details, such as checking business name availability, preparing Articles of Organization, and filing documents with the Secretary of State. These procedures ensure your business is ready to operate from the start, helping to avoid small errors during the beginning stages. Reputable teams will help you streamline your processes to ensure you understand the various challenges as your business grows.
Registered Agent Services
States agencies require all businesses, whether LLCs or corporations, to have a registered agent for their business. A registered agent is a registered address that serves as the contact link between your business and the government.
You must have a physical location in the same location where you form the business. This can be a substantial hurdle for entrepreneurs to overcome. Corporate services providers eliminate that hurdle.
Easily Accessible Company Documents
As an entrepreneur, do you really want to bog yourself down with miscellaneous documents and complex filing requirements? Reputable corporate services providers store and organize all of your documents in an easily accessible format, helping you avoid any late or incorrectly-filed documentation. They will also deliver documents, including your business formation and EIN.
Cost-Effective and Saves Time
Entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t have time to waste. However, with a corporate services provider, you have more time to focus on your core business principles.
Outsourcing Secretarial Management
Corporate services providers simplify outsourcing your secretarial duties. In the past, outsourcing could quickly become complicated due to having to contact law firms, accounting companies, and compliance services separately. Reputable corporate services providers handle all of these operations with one provider.
Additionally, corporate secretarial roles have expanded substantially in recent years, turning what was once solely administrative into an instrumental piece that streamlines company operations and effectively manages executives’ time.
What Is Entity Management?
Entity management is the process of managing a company’s vital information and documents to ensure they stay compliant as well as organized. As the business world becomes more digital, emerging software makes these processes easier and more efficient. Outsourcing your entity management gives you access to professionals who can integrate the most advanced software into your business.
Why Do You Need an Entity Management System?
More Efficient Strategy
Requesting reports and documents from multiple vendors hampers your ability to create effective strategies. Navigating these reports and ensuring they are accurate is a critical component of entity management that can eat time from executives focusing on their core principles.
The last thing you need is for your team to make a minor mistake or miss a deadline. That’s what happens when you overload employees with responsibilities that should be fulfilled directly. Putting these responsibilities in the hands of an entity management partner leads to substantial efficiency and productivity gains. With an outsourced entity management partner, you can automate workflows and use notifications to prompt shareholders to take action.
Higher-Quality Data
When data gets stored on a central platform or software, you can analyze and utilize more of it. You also run less of a risk of duplicating or making an error on the corporate record, which translates to higher-quality entity data and less painful audit processes. When it comes to entity management, the most important components are accurate, up-to-date data.
Company-Wide Compliance
Regardless of your business’s size, you need to be able to standardize objectives if you want to retain efficiency and productivity. Entity management services give you a company-wide, repeatable process for compliance. Automated filings to local regulatory agencies maintain a more accurate corporate record for legal documents and avoid losing resources by looking for details across multiple systems.
Easily-Managed Entity Risk
With more efficient organization and compliance processes comes less entity risk. When all of your company’s repository is archived and accessible on a company-wide basis, compliance is easier to manage. Components of entity risk management, such as automated filing and real-time data, simplify this process and highlight potential compliance or legal issues so you can respond quickly and decisively.
Corporate Agents
Corporations need corporate agents to provide services that reduce costs and resources. Using a corporate agent helps businesses avoid hiring and training personnel to perform banking tasks. The main reason trusting your accountant service as a corporate agent is beneficial for your company is that your accountant already understands all of your critical compliance and legal documentation.
When choosing a corporate agent, you should pre-define all of your stipulations beforehand. You likely won’t want your corporate agent to handle all of the legal or compliance issues you face, but specific tasks.
Corporate Legal Services
As evidenced by entity management, cutting down on the points of contact for legal services is another area where corporate services providers can help. Because these organizations are familiar with all of your tax and compliance information, they can act as a valuable resource for legal services. An outsourced legal service can spend more time doing their due diligence on your behalf, ensuring you’re in compliance with local, state, and federal laws.
Corporate services providers can handle the following legal requirements for businesses:
- Dissolutions
- Mergers
- DBAs
- Reinstatements
- Amendments
- EIN Obtainment
How do Outsourced Corporate Services Help Businesses?
Corporate services cover a wide range of business processes that companies typically spread out across multiple agents, whether in-house or outsourced. This leads to needless confusion and inefficiency, strangling your resources and disjointing your business as a whole.
Corporate services providers can help you consolidate your compliance and legal documentation in one location so all of your executives have easy access. If you’re looking to start a new business, need help with entity management, want your corporate agent in one location, or need legal services, corporate services providers offer a unified approach. These providers help you allocate resources more efficiently and simplify all of your compliance and legal documentation in one location.
At Fully Accountable, we believe in providing more than simple bookkeeping and compliance services to businesses of all industries and sizes. We want you to feel like you have a partner in your business expansion. Instead of spreading yourself thin with multiple providers, contact us today to streamline your long-term expansion, ensuring all of your compliance and legal documentation stays in an easily accessible location.
