With a personal account there is a person, and the bank can satisfy itself about a person. A business is not a thing anybody can look at. It is a structure, and a structure exists only in documents: one that says it exists, one that says what it does, one that says who is behind it, and one that says which of those people may speak for it. Every requirement in this subject, and every frustrating afternoon in it, comes out of that. Which also explains the thing that actually goes wrong, and it is almost never what businesses expect. The entity’s own papers are not the problem — they exist, somebody can find them, and they say what they say. The people are the problem, because the people change and the paper does not follow them. A partner leaves. A director is replaced. An office-bearer’s term ends. And the bank’s record of who may operate the account stays exactly as it was on the morning the account was opened, because nothing that happens inside a business reaches its bank by itself. That gap is quiet, it is universal, and it surfaces at the worst possible times — in the middle of a tender, at a facility review, or on the day somebody who left two years ago is still on record as able to sign.
Four questions, and every document on any requirement list is answering one of them.
Does this entity exist? Whatever constitutes it — the deed, the incorporation documents, the registration of the society.
What does it do, and from where? The business itself, and the premises it operates from.
Who is behind it? The individuals — partners, directors, office-bearers — identified as individuals, because ultimately a structure is made of people.
Who may speak for it to this bank? The narrowest and most important question, and the one that causes the trouble.
Sorting a requirement list into those four buckets is worth doing, because it turns an intimidating page into four small tasks, and because it shows you immediately which bucket you are weak in. In our experience it is almost always the fourth.
The sentence this whole page is built on, and it is worth sitting with because it is counter-intuitive.
A constituting document is written once and then sits still. Ten years later it says exactly what it said. It is findable, it is unambiguous about what it covers, and producing it for a bank is an errand rather than a project.
The people are the opposite. Partners join and leave. Directors change. Committees turn over on a cycle. Somebody emigrates, somebody retires, somebody falls out. Each of those is recorded somewhere inside the business — and none of it reaches the bank, because there is no mechanism by which it would.
So the bank’s picture of your business is a photograph taken on the day you opened the account, updated only when somebody walked in with a paper and asked for it to be updated. In a business of any age, that photograph is usually wrong in at least one particular.
Which makes the maintenance half of this page more valuable than the opening half, even though the opening half is what people come looking for.
The single highest-value hour in this subject, and hardly anybody spends it.
Take out whatever constitutes your business and look for one thing: does it say who may deal with a bank, and how?
In a great many firms the answer is no. The deed was drawn when the business started, covering profit shares and duties, and the question of banking either was not addressed or was addressed in a sentence that has not aged well — naming a person who left, or a way of working nobody follows.
In companies the equivalent gap is a resolution everybody remembers passing and nobody wrote up properly, or one that authorised an account at a bank the company no longer uses.
In societies and associations it is usually the record of who currently holds office, which exists in minutes somewhere and not in a form anybody outside the committee can read.
None of those is hard to fix and all of them are much easier to fix now than at a counter. A firm’s founding document is what our partnership deed service handles; a company’s authority is our board resolution service; and where the understandings among the people behind a company need setting down properly, that is our shareholders agreement service.
A distinction worth being precise about, because businesses regularly get it backwards.
The bank does not decide who may sign. Your own constitution decides, and the bank reads what it says and records it. If your document is clear, the bank follows it. If your document is vague, the bank cannot resolve the vagueness for you — it will ask you to, and until you do, nothing moves.
So a request for clarity from a branch is not obstruction. It is the bank saying, accurately, that it has been asked to let somebody move a structure’s money and the only thing that tells it who may do that is your paper.
Two practical consequences. Write the authority for the bank’s purpose, not in general terms — a resolution that says the company may open accounts is weaker than one that names the bank, the account and the people, and says in what combination they may operate it.
And name roles as well as people where you can, so that the document survives one person leaving. How far that is possible depends on your structure, and it is worth asking the question when the document is being drawn.
A real decision with real costs on both sides, and it is almost always made by default.
One signatory is fast. Nobody waits for anybody. It also concentrates the risk in a single person and a single set of credentials, and it removes the natural check that a second pair of eyes provides.
Two signatories is safer and slower, and the slowness is not the real cost. The real cost is the day one of them is unreachable — travelling, unwell, estranged, gone — and the account cannot be operated at all. Businesses that chose two for safety sometimes discover they chose paralysis.
Where a bank offers it, a threshold is the useful middle: one signature up to a value, two above it. Ask whether that is available rather than assuming it is not, because it frequently is and it is rarely volunteered.
Whatever you choose, choose it out loud, with the people it affects in the room, and write down why. A year later somebody will ask why the arrangement is what it is, and “that is how it was set up” is not an answer that helps anyone.
And build in the failure case: what happens if a signatory becomes unavailable? Knowing the answer before it is needed is the difference between an inconvenience and a fortnight.
Worth separating out, because the advice everywhere else on this page assumes several people and a great many businesses are one.
Where the business and the person are not legally distinct, the bank is dealing with a person trading under a name, and the documents reflect that: the individual’s own identity and address, plus whatever shows that the business exists and that this person runs it.
Two things matter more here than anywhere else, precisely because there is nobody else in the room.
Nobody is checking anybody. Every safeguard described above — a second signature, a value threshold, somebody noticing an unusual instruction — is absent by construction. Which makes the ordinary disciplines heavier: a separate account rather than a mixed one, a record behind every movement, and credentials that genuinely nobody else has.
Nobody else can act if you cannot. Illness, travel, an accident — and the business account simply stops. That is a real operational risk and it has answers worth asking the bank about in advance rather than in the week it happens. Whatever arrangement you make, make it deliberately and keep it no wider than it needs to be.
And if the business grows into something with partners or a company behind it, the account does not come along automatically — a different entity is a different customer, and that is a new account rather than a renamed one.
Two documents, doing two different jobs, and conflating them is the commonest reason a business believes it has changed something and finds it has not.
The resolution, or the deed provision, is your internal decision. It records what the business decided and who it authorised.
The mandate is the bank’s instruction. It is what the bank actually operates on — the record in its own system of who may do what.
Passing a resolution does not change the mandate. Somebody has to take the resolution to the bank and have the mandate updated, and then the bank acts on the new position. Until that happens, the bank continues, entirely correctly, to do what it was told the last time somebody told it something.
So whenever anything changes internally, the question to ask is not “have we passed the resolution?” It is “has the mandate been updated, and do we have the acknowledgement?”
The most common failure in this subject, and it is never a failure of intent. It is simply a step that belongs to nobody.
Somebody leaves the firm, resigns from the board, or reaches the end of a term. Internally this is handled — there is a document, there is an understanding, everyone knows. At the bank, nothing has happened at all.
So the sequence, and it should run in the same week rather than the same quarter. Write to the bank with the internal document that records the change. Have the mandate updated and get written confirmation of the new position. Deal with what was attached to that person — a card, access credentials, a cheque book in their custody. And check the list afterwards rather than assuming the instruction was carried out in full.
That last step matters more than it sounds: banks process what they are asked to process, and a request that named one account while the person was on three is a request half completed.
Where the departure is not amicable, do all of this faster rather than more carefully. The documentation is the same; the urgency is not.
The mirror image, and it fails differently: not forgotten, but done informally.
A new partner or director starts operating the account in practice long before the bank has been told, because somebody with authority is passing them the instrument or the credentials. That is understandable and it is a genuinely bad idea, because the bank’s record then says one thing and reality says another, and every transaction in between sits in that gap.
The fix is ordinary: the internal document, then the bank, then the mandate updated, then the new person’s own identification on record as the bank requires — and only then do they operate the account.
Two additions worth making at the same time, because you are already there. Remove anybody who should no longer be on the list, since the same visit can do both. And ask for the current mandate as recorded, so you leave with the bank’s version rather than your belief about it.
Not one form. A set of them, in an order, and the order matters.
The internal change first — whatever makes the new name the entity’s actual name.
Then the bank, with that document, and get the account renamed rather than merely noted.
Then everything attached to the account: the mandate, instruments in the old name, cheque books, anything printed, and every mandate somebody else holds against you.
That third stage is where businesses stop, because the account itself now looks correct. The pieces that get missed are the ones other people rely on — a customer paying into a name that no longer matches, a supplier’s standing instruction, a mandate held by somebody who has not been told.
For the records half of a change like this, see our bank KYC guide; and our name change guide explains the sequencing principle that governs here as well — certain records will not take an amendment until others have already been amended.
Dull, routine, and the root of a surprising share of what goes wrong afterwards.
The address on the bank’s record is where notices reach you, and a business the bank cannot reach is a business that finds out about problems late — after a restriction, after a deadline, after somebody else has noticed.
So: tell the bank in writing, get an acknowledgement, and update it wherever else it appears rather than in the one place you happened to be dealing with. If the new premises have to be evidenced, our rent agreement guide explains what separates a tenancy paper an institution will take from one that simply exists on a page.
And if the business operates from more than one place, be clear which address is the one for correspondence, rather than letting different institutions hold different ones. That inconsistency is invisible until the month it matters.
The same structure as everything above, with one difficulty that is specific and predictable: office-bearers change on a cycle, and the cycle does not know about the bank.
What the bank generally wants is the rules or bye-laws, the record of who currently holds office and how they came to, and a resolution authorising the account and naming who may operate it.
The difficulty is that each of those is produced by a committee for a committee. Minutes are written for members, not for a bank clerk who has never met anybody. So the practical instruction is: produce the record in a form somebody outside the association can read — who holds which office, from when, on what authority, signed by whoever your rules say signs such things.
And build the bank into the handover. Every time office-bearers change, the bank visit is part of the handover, not an errand for later. An association whose account is operated by people the bank has never been told about is a problem waiting for an audit, and it lands on whoever is in office when it surfaces rather than on whoever created it.
One more thing worth saying plainly to committees: this is exactly the kind of task that gets deferred because it is nobody’s portfolio. Give it to a named office rather than to goodwill.
Two different questions that get asked as one.
Separate entities need separate accounts. That is not a preference; it follows from who the customer is. Two businesses cannot share an account any more than two people can share an identity.
One entity with several activities is a different question, and it is a bookkeeping decision rather than a legal one. The honest trade-off: separate accounts give you clarity, and every account is another record to keep current, another mandate to review, another thing to close properly one day.
Our view, offered as documentation rather than advice: separate where the separation answers a question somebody will actually ask — a project, a client’s money, a branch that has to account for itself — and resist separating out of tidiness alone.
And whatever you decide, write down what each account is for, on one sheet with the rest. An account whose purpose nobody can state is an account nobody will close and nobody will reconcile.
Extremely common at the start, and the difficulty is precisely that it works for a while.
The practical problems are ordinary rather than dramatic, and they all arrive later. Money that cannot be cleanly attributed to the business. A record that will not answer a question from a lender, a buyer or a partner. A history that is awkward to explain at exactly the moment you want it to be simple.
What we will not do is tell you it is a tax problem or a compliance problem, because we are not accountants and that is not our advice to give. Ask somebody who is, about your own position.
What we will say is the documentary half: the longer it runs, the more work it is to unwind, because separating a mingled history is harder than keeping two records apart from the beginning. If you are early enough that it is a few months, it is an afternoon. If it is four years, it is a project.
And if you are moving to a proper account now, do not simply start using the new one — move the arrangements: the mandates, the standing instructions, the people paying you, and the people you pay. A half-migrated position is worse than either.
A single request, made once, that routinely surprises businesses more than anything else on this page.
Ask the bank, in writing, for a list of everything currently live on the account: standing instructions, mandates, cards issued and to whom, facilities, instruments outstanding, and any authority recorded.
What comes back, in a business of a few years, generally includes at least one of the following. A debit running for a service cancelled long ago. A card in the name of somebody who left. A mandate given to a supplier the business no longer uses. An authority recorded for a person nobody would authorise today.
None of that is anybody’s fault. It accumulates because each item was set up deliberately and none of them was ever anybody’s job to take down. The list exists; nobody has ever asked for it.
Do it once, deal with what it turns up, and then repeat it at the annual review. Where an instrument is outstanding, our bank guarantee guide covers the closing sequence that actually releases what is tied up.
Not a question about trust, and it is worth saying that at the start because people hear it as one. It is a question about being able to answer something later.
Cheque books, cards, tokens, credentials. In small businesses these frequently live in a drawer everybody can reach, which works perfectly until the day somebody needs to know who had access to what, and then nobody can say.
So: a named custodian, and a note of who holds what, reviewed when it changes. Two lines on the same sheet as everything else.
And the rule that applies to every business of every size: nobody shares credentials. Not to save time, not because somebody is travelling, not because it is quicker. Where a second person needs to operate, the answer is a mandate, not a password. Our bank KYC guide sets out why an instruction arriving by any route other than your own is the shape almost all fraud now takes, and businesses are targeted at least as often as individuals.
Where something has gone wrong in that direction, speed matters more than certainty — our cyber crime complaint service prepares the report, and it belongs in hours rather than days.
Written carefully, because the useful part here is documentary and the rest is not ours.
There are requirements about how money moves through a business account, they differ by situation, and they change. Ask your bank about the operating position and your accountant about the rest; this page gives no figures and no rules for exactly that reason.
What is squarely documentary, and is the part businesses get wrong: whatever moves, keep the record of why. A transaction with a document behind it is a fact. The same transaction without one is a question, and questions surface in the least convenient places — a periodic verification, a facility review, a buyer’s inspection, a dispute with somebody who was once a partner.
The habit that costs nothing: a reference on every transfer that means something six months later, and the underlying document filed where the transaction can find it. It sounds like bookkeeping advice and it is really about being able to explain your own account.
Discussed in the same meeting, documented separately, and reviewed on their own cycle — and businesses routinely treat them as features of the account.
An overdraft, a working capital line, an instrument limit: each has its own papers, its own security, its own conditions and its own review. The account is the relationship; the facility is an arrangement inside it.
Two consequences worth holding. What is documented for the facility can be wider than what you expected — including who has undertaken what personally, which is worth asking about explicitly rather than discovering. And a facility review is a moment when everything else gets looked at: the signatory list, the constitution, the verification position. A business whose records are current walks through it; one whose records are not spends a month on it.
Where instruments are issued against a limit, our bank guarantee guide covers what they tie up and the closing sequence that releases it — which is the single most common piece of quietly locked working capital we see.
The same exercise every account is subject to, and it lands harder on a business.
For an individual, a restriction is inconvenient. For a business, payments fail outward as well as inward, which means other people find out — a supplier whose payment bounced, a salary that did not arrive, a customer whose mandate failed. The reputational cost arrives before the administrative one is even understood.
What makes it worse is the shape of the request: it goes to the address and the contact on record, which for a business is frequently a person who has left or a premises vacated two moves ago.
Which puts the remedy exactly where the rest of this page puts it: hold the contacts and the roster current, and when a verification request lands, treat it as something with a deadline rather than as filing. Our bank KYC guide covers the exercise itself, including the version of it that is not a request at all.
Everything this page asks you to keep fits on a single page, and a business that has it can answer in a minute what otherwise takes an afternoon of asking around.
At the top: the entity as its constituting document names it, and where that document lives.
Then, per account: bank and branch, what the account is for, who is on the mandate and in what combination, what recurring payments leave from it, and what facilities or instruments are attached.
Then two lines that are not about accounts at all: who holds which cheque book, card or token, and when this sheet was last checked.
Keep it where more than one person can find it, and keep it with the copies — the constituting document, the authority as passed, the mandate as recorded by the bank, and the account particulars.
The reason this earns its place is not tidiness. It is that every difficult conversation in this subject — a verification, a facility review, a partner asking a question, somebody taking over a role — begins by asking for exactly what is on that sheet, and a business that cannot produce it spends the first week of each of those reconstructing it.
The situation this page is quietly written for, because it is where all the accumulated gaps arrive at once.
A new partner takes on the finances. A treasurer succeeds another. A family business passes to the next generation. Whoever it is inherits a set of arrangements nobody has written down, made by people who are no longer explaining them.
Four things to hand over, and they are the same four whatever the entity. The one sheet above. The list from the bank of what is live on the account, obtained fresh rather than passed on. The mandate as the bank currently records it, not as anybody believes it to be. And a note of what is known to be out of date, honestly — because the person leaving usually knows, and the person arriving will otherwise find out the expensive way.
And one instruction for whoever is arriving: do the annual review in your first month rather than your first year. It is the cheapest possible way to find out what you have actually inherited, and it is far easier to raise a gap as something you discovered than as something you allowed to continue.
Four questions, once a year and after any change in the people. It is the whole maintenance programme.
Is the signatory list right? Not what you believe — what the bank has recorded. Ask for it.
Is the address and contact right? Including the person whose number is on the record.
Is everything live on the account still wanted? The list from the section above.
Is there an account that should be closed? There usually is.
Give it to a named person and put it in the same month every year, next to something that already happens. Reviews attached to a date get done; reviews attached to good intentions do not.
Usually a document, rarely you, and almost always solvable in writing.
Ask two things and ask for both in writing: what is the reason, and what would satisfy it. Then say plainly what you can supply instead of whatever you cannot. A written exchange resolves in days what repeated counter visits stretch over weeks, because it puts the question in front of somebody who has to answer it rather than somebody who is between customers.
Where the sticking point is your own internal document — a deed that does not address banking, a resolution that does not exist — the answer is to fix that rather than to argue, and it is faster than it sounds.
Still stuck, and there is a complaints channel inside the bank that charges nothing; working it is covered in our banking complaint guide, and the step above it is our RBI complaint assistance service. Taking your business to a different bank is a perfectly respectable answer too, and now and then the right one.
Businesses accumulate these more than individuals do — an account opened for one project, one client, one branch, one scheme — and each one that falls silent takes a mandate or a credit with it. The revival is heavier for an entity than for a person, because the authority that can ask for it has usually changed since. Our dormant account guide sets out what is involved.
The mirror of opening, and it needs the same authority that opened it — which businesses forget, and then find that the person who can close it is no longer around to.
Decide it properly, with whatever internal authority your constitution requires, and record the decision.
Move the balance and know where it went.
Cancel every mandate and standing instruction, having first asked for the list of what is running rather than relying on memory.
Return what the bank asks for and have that recorded.
Obtain it on paper from the bank that the account stands closed with no balance of obligation either way.
An abandoned business account is worse than an abandoned personal one, because the entity outlives the people who remember it. Somebody inherits the question years later with nobody left to ask, and our dormant account reactivation service exists largely because of it.
All about people, none about paper.
A signatory who left is still on record, because leaving the business is not the same event as leaving the bank’s file.
The resolution was passed and the mandate was never updated, so the bank kept doing what it was last told.
The constitution never said who may deal with a bank, and nobody found out until a counter asked.
The notice went to an address two moves ago, and the restriction arrived before the letter did.
Nobody ever asked what was live on the account, so a debit and a card outlived their reasons.
The account was abandoned rather than closed, and surfaced years later as somebody else’s problem.
We start inside your business rather than at the bank, because that is where the delays actually originate. We read your constituting document and tell you whether it says who may deal with a bank — and in a surprising share of cases the honest answer is that it does not, which is a short fix now and an expensive one at a counter.
Then we prepare the authority properly: named to the bank, named to the account, naming the people and the combination, in a form the bank can act on rather than a general statement of intent.
We get the branch’s own current requirement for your kind of entity, reconcile the list of people with reality before anything is submitted — which is the step that catches the departed partner — and assemble the file against that list rather than a general one.
And we set up the maintenance, because it is what actually saves money: the mandate as recorded, the list of what is live on the account, and the twenty-minute annual review with a named owner. Where changes come later — somebody leaves, somebody joins, a name or an address changes — we run the written step to the bank that your internal decision does not run by itself.
Recommending a bank or a product is not something this firm does. Which institution, which account type, what to keep in it, which facility to take — those sit outside our work entirely, and parts of that field are licensed work we are not licensed for.
We are not accountants and this is not tax advice. How money should move through your business, what is deductible, how to treat anything — ask somebody qualified, about your own position.
A one-time code, a PIN or a password is never requested here, and there is no circumstance in which we would want one. If a caller invokes our name and asks for any of them, that caller is not from this firm.
Operating the account stays with you. Documents are our end of it, along with telling you where each one goes.
We do not prepare an authority wider than the task. If the purpose is one account at one bank, that is what the document should say.
We do not put a person on a mandate on somebody’s say-so. It goes on the strength of the internal document that authorises it, or it does not go.
Our fee for this work starts at ₹1,499, the usual span is 2 – 7 days, we tell you the total before we start, and nothing is payable in advance. Where an internal document has to be fixed first — an old deed, a resolution that was never written up — that has its own timeline and you hear about it in the first conversation rather than the last.
What is actually being bought is not access to a bank, which needs no help. It is the hour spent inside your own papers before anybody goes anywhere: the constitution read, the authority written so a bank can act on it, and the list of people reconciled with who is actually there.
And then the part that keeps paying: the maintenance nobody owns. Where a business has been running a few years, the single most useful thing we do is the written request for what is live on the account — because that list, in our experience, is never what anybody expected.
The honest note this page owes: every word of this you can do yourselves. Read your own deed. Write to the branch and ask what it needs for your kind of entity. Ask for the mandate as recorded and the list of what is running. Put twenty minutes in the diary once a year with somebody’s name on it. If this page produces nothing but that diary entry, it has done its job.
We start inside your business rather than at the bank: your constituting document read and, where it is silent about banking, fixed; the authority written so a bank can actually act on it; the branch’s own requirement for your kind of entity obtained; and the list of people reconciled with who is really there before anything is submitted. Then the maintenance nobody owns — the mandate as recorded, the list of what is live on the account, and a twenty-minute annual review with a named owner.
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