You have a great deal of responsibility if you own your own company. You have a responsibility to ensure that your company is doing its business in a lawful and compliant way, and one of the things you will often need to do to accomplish this goal is to complete and submit a variety of corporation documentation and forms. Your company can be jeopardized if you do not have all the necessary papers. As the owner of a company, there are some records that you absolutely must have on file. In this piece, we will go over some of the most vital of these records. In addition, we will guide how to complete the forms properly and where to locate them.
Articles Of Incorporation
You have a lot of duties as a company owner. To ensure that your firm is running lawfully and in compliance with the law, you must fill out and submit numerous corporation documentation and forms. Your firm may be in jeopardy if it lacks the necessary documentation. When running a successful small company, you must maintain track of all your paperwork. We’ll also help you know where to look for these documents and how to fill them out. Even though you must submit articles of incorporation with your state and federal authorities, most states make this procedure straightforward. They’ll even notify you by email or text when your application has been approved. At this stage, in most states, you don’t need to submit any extra corporation documentation and forms until you become a fully-fledged corporate company.
The Corporate Bylaws
Failure to submit your bylaws with the state within a certain time frame may result in penalties and fines. These regulations govern how your business will run under your bylaws. When it comes to a company’s policies, they might encompass anything from the salary of its officials to whether shareholders can bring their pets into the company’s meetings. Even though your bylaws aren’t carved in stone, the regulations you put in place are nonetheless binding on your company. Because of this, it’s ideal to acquire them early on.
Before your annual meeting, which is also a good opportunity to do a performance evaluation of your board of directors, is the ideal time to conduct a review of your bylaws. Directors and shareholders might use the annual meeting to talk about the company’s progress, what worked well in the previous year and what needs to be improved (or eliminated), and then formalize those changes in new or updated bylaws.
Minutes Of Meetings
The minutes from the board meetings are the essential item in your inventory. These minutes need to provide a concise summary of the events that transpired during the meeting to elucidate the choices that were reached. The specifics of the minutes will change depending on the requirements of your corporation—for example, if your corporation is an LLC or an S-Corp, the resolution section will be very different than if it’s a C-Corp—but the primary functions will stay the same no matter how long your company has been in operation. The provision of “legal notice” is the primary function of minutes, which is why their creation is required. Everyone interested in your company and wants to know what has been going on at board meetings and how decisions have been made has access to the information provided by legal notice.
List Of Shareholders or Members as One of The Corporation Documentation and Forms
According to sba.gov, your other order of business will be to compile a list of members or shareholders in the company. If you run your business as a sole proprietorship, then the only employee will be you. If more than one person owns your business, you will need to know who those owners are and the percentage of ownership they hold to be ready to give them the proper legal paperwork at the appropriate time.
If your company has more than one owner, you must also make sure that you put yourself on this list. A shareholder agreement, for instance, will ensure that everyone agrees on how to share the profits and losses of the firm. In contrast, an operating agreement will define how the company will work and who will have what authority in the organization.
The Statement of Organization
To legally do business as a corporation, you must submit corporation documentation and forms such as the Statement of Organization with the state where you will be doing business and the Internal Revenue Service. It contains the names of all of the active board members, officials, and shareholders, as well as their respective residences and the company’s registered agent. If you provide all of these details in the Statement of Organization, it is legally binding that all of these persons exist and have decided to work together on this project. It is not legally binding if you do not include these details. Additionally, it identifies your business and provides a list of the basic details of its shareholders. You must complete this form in duplicate, one copy for your own records and one for the records of the state.
We’re happy to answer any questions you might have about modernizing your business, but it’s also best to ensure you’re familiar with our range of services. Call today at (800) 580-4870 for a consultation on the types of corporation documentation and forms.
