Steps to Incorporation, Part 2

Here’s part 2 of our blog series on Steps to Incorporation:

Once you’ve determined whether the corporation will be federal or provincial, it is time to pick your name.  You must confirm that the name is available and is not already being used.  To do this you can do a quick search (in most provinces) and you will then know if the name is available or not.  Sometimes you may find that there is a name being used that is very similar to the name you chose.  if that is the case you may not want to move forward with that name as you could run into issues down the road, such as confusion to the public or even lawsuits from the corporation that has the similar name.  You can simply look at variations of your name to get around this issue, or you may have to look at a completely different name.  Also keep in mind when deciding on a name that you most likely will need a website so it is good to check what domains are available that you can use with your business name.  Once you’ve determined your name is available for the corporation, you can hold on to it for a period of time if you are not ready to incorporate.  This is important, otherwise someone else could take the name before you incorporate it.  To do this you simply get a NUANS through the registry, or Kustom Design can do this for you.

Next you need to confirm your structuring.  Although you should have been planning for this structure right from the beginning, now is the time to finalize it.  If you have not read my blog on Structuring your Corporation, then go now and read through that blog in detail.  Keep in mind that it is important to determine who the shareholders, directors and officers will be.  If you have a family trust and/or a holding company then you should not own an operating company personally, the trust and/or holding corporation should own the operating company.  If you are partnering with other people than you should definitely look at getting a Unanimous Shareholder’s Agreement (U.S.A.) as discussed in a prior blog of this series.

Last part of this blog series will be posted soon! Please check back!

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!