Steps to Incorporation, Part 1

We’ve been discussing Corporations in great depth over this blog series and many are asking “How do I start a Corporation?”  This is what we will cover in this blog series: Steps to Incorporation.  As always, this is just a guideline and you should always consult with your professional to ensure you are taking all the steps you need to for your corporation as each corporation and business is unique.

The first step, once you’ve decided to incorporate, is to determine if the corporation is to be a Federal Corporation or a Provincial Corporation.  This really depends on where you will be conducting your business from.  If you are just operating within a province then of course you just need to incorporate in that province.  However, if you want to conduct business in multiple Provincial Jurisdictions then you may want to look at the possibility of setting up a Federal Corporation (Charter).  If you are just operating in a couple or a few provinces you can incorporate in your province and then file for extra provincial registrations for the other province(s) you will conduct business in (instead of incorporating Federally).  Having too many extra provincial registrations can become cumbersome, so if you are conducting business in many provinces then you should definitely look at a federal corporation.   Keep in mind here that when we talk about conducting business in more than one province, we are not just talking about having a few clients or customers that purchase your product or service outside of your province.  When we talk about conducting business we are talking about where you are actually doing the business.  For example you may have offices in multiple provinces, or you may travel back and forth regularly to do business in other provinces.  This is completely different from just having some out of province clients or customers.  If you only have a few out of province clients or customers, then you do not need to extra provincially register, nor would you need a federal corporation.

We’ll continue our blog series on Steps to Incorporation next week!