Company Formation Agents

Company formation agents are people who form a company for you. RegisteredAddress.co.uk offers this service: https://www.registeredaddress.co.uk/company-formation

They take the strain out of registering a company at Companies House. Many small businessmen are daunted by the task of setting up their own company. They don't know what the technical terms mean. They're worried about getting something wrong. And they are right to be!

Typical mistakes are:

- Getting the directors and shareholders mixed up.
- Giving a shareholder too much of the company.
- Not realising that shareholders are the owners of the company, not the directors.
- Getting the date of birth of a director wrong.
- Not realising that the Director's Service (or Correspondence) Address is public information.
- Setting share capital at £1m, not realising that it has to be accounted for.
- Not spelling the company name correctly.

Good news! These mistakes can be corrected later.
Bad news: It can take up to two weeks, and the error, and its correction, remain on the public record.

That need not be a disaster. The world isn't particularly interested in your new company. You are. However, credit-referencing agencies may not be too impressed if Directors are dropped willy-nilly or dates of birth are wrong. So it's worth going slow and getting it right.

Consider using a formation agent. They've formed lots of companies and a good one will point out possible problems before he submits your company formation.

Let it be said: forming a company is fairly easy. If you know your own name, date of birth, can spell your company name and know what a Director and Shareholder actually are, you can do it yourself at Companies House website quite easily.

Sometimes formation agent throw in useful extras that Companies House doesn't, like share certificates and minutes of the first company meeting.

Company formation agents typically offer one or more of the following:

- Advice on the type of company that best suits your needs, or whether you should set one up at all;
- Help in naming your company, including those that require special permission (ones that have 'reserved words');
- Secretarial support;
- Virtual office (mailing address) services;
- Assistance in getting a business bank account.

This service is especially useful to foreign residents, who may not know local customs or have a good grasp of the English language. The UK makes setting up a company easy and maintaining it is simple, compared to other jurisdictions.

As Western capitalism becomes digitised and capital itself becomes more and more mobile, nation states are waking up to the fact that they can't continue treating local businesses as cash cows. Too much regulation stifles businesses and too much taxation causes them to close up shop and/or move abroad. So countries like the UK and Ireland have set up web portals to make the legal maintenances of a company easier.

Using a formation agent who charges a reasonable fee saves you having to research local regulations, to make sure you get precisely the kind of setup you want.

All going well, you get your company set up in good time, you get digital copies of your formation documents emailed to you and then paper ones posted on a few days after that.

You can then proceed with your exciting enterprise, taking on the world with your better, faster, cheaper, essential product!