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Home › Services › Document Guides › INC-20A Commencement Filing

Your company exists. That is not the same as being able to begin.

You have the certificate. You have a name, a number, a PAN, probably a bank account. And existence and capacity are two different things — incorporation delivers the first, and one step still sits between all of that and being permitted to start. Here is why it gets missed, and it is structural rather than careless. Every other step in incorporation produces something you can hold: a sealed certificate, a number, a letterhead, a cheque book. People congratulate each other. This one produces nothing at all — no artifact, no moment, nothing to photograph. And in any process, the step with no visible output is the step that gets dropped. Which is the same thing said another way: incorporation is a starting line wearing the appearance of a finish line, and the people it catches are the ones who have just stopped checking. Then the fact that fixes the whole sequence. This filing is proof of an event, so it cannot come before the event. It rests on the money the founders subscribed for having actually been brought in — which means the delay is never the paperwork. It is that nobody paid in. And the correction worth making gently: that figure was not your intention. It was your promise, written in your own founding documents, to each other. Founders treat the subscribed amount as notional because nobody asked for it on the day; here is where that figure stops being a line in a document and has to become a bank entry. Next, the reason the position persists for months. From the outside the company looks entirely fine. It can print letterhead and sign things; customers, suppliers and banks deal with it normally. Nothing in an ordinary week signals the missing step, and consequences in this area accrue over time rather than arriving as an event — and they attach to individuals as well as to the company. One more, which catches people: this is usually the moment at which the address in your papers and the place your company actually sits have to be the same, and those two are very often different. That address is where notices go, and a notice properly sent there has reached you whether anybody collected it or not. What we rule out: we will not file that something happened before it has, we print no penalty or figure, and we do not tell you whether the requirement reaches your company.

From ₹999 1 – 3 days Existence ≠ capacity Proof of an event
We incorporated our private limited company five months ago and we have been working since then, raising invoices and paying people. Our new accountant has just told us that we never did some filing that was supposed to happen at the start, and that technically we were not allowed to begin. We have the incorporation certificate framed on the wall. How can we not have been allowed to start, and how much trouble is this?Let me separate two things that incorporation deliberately blurs, because once they are apart the rest of this becomes manageable rather than frightening. Your company exists. That is a real fact and nothing anybody says will take it away. There is a certificate, a registered number, a name that nobody else can use, and a legal person that did not exist six months ago. All of that is true. Existing, though, is not the same as being able to begin. Capacity is a separate thing, and incorporation delivers only the first of the two. There is a step that sits between having a company and being permitted to start operating it, and in your case that step did not happen. So before anything else, let me tell you why it did not happen, because it is almost never carelessness and I have seen it in very well run companies. Think about every other thing that happened during your incorporation. Each one produced something. The name approval produced an approval. The incorporation produced a certificate with a seal on it, which you have framed. There was a number, then a PAN, then a bank account with a cheque book. Somebody probably ordered letterhead. People congratulated you. Every single step handed you an object. Now consider the step that was missed. It produces nothing. No certificate, no card, no stamp, nothing for the wall. Nobody says well done. There is no moment attached to it at all. And here is the general principle underneath, which is worth carrying well beyond company law. In any process, the step with no visible output is the step that gets dropped. Not the difficult step, not the expensive step. The invisible one. Which is also why I would put this differently from how it is usually described to founders. Incorporation is not the finish line. It looks exactly like one, and that is the problem. Weeks of paperwork end with a sealed document arriving, and everything about that experience says completed. It is in fact a starting line wearing the appearance of a finish line, and the founders most at risk are the ones who feel most finished. Now to the thing that actually unblocks your situation, and it is not the form. The filing you are missing is, in substance, proof that something happened. It confirms that the money you and your co-founders subscribed for has actually been brought into the company, and where the company actually is. That has one enormous consequence for sequencing, and it is the sentence I would most want you to take from this conversation. Because it is proof of an event, it cannot come before the event. So in almost every delayed case I see, the filing was never the thing that was late. The event was. The paperwork could have been done in an afternoon, and the subscribed money had not gone into the company. And there is one sentence that turns up on nearly every file of this kind; you may well have said it yourself. We will put the money in later. I want to correct that gently, because it rests on a misreading rather than on any bad faith. That figure in your incorporation documents was not a statement of your intention. It was a promise. You made it in writing, in your own founding documents, to each other. Founders routinely treat the subscribed amount as notional, and the reason is entirely understandable: nobody asked for it on the day, nothing bounced, and the company carried on. But it was never notional, and this filing is simply the moment at which that becomes concrete. Usually it is also a small amount, which is the frustrating part. In most small companies the subscribed figure is modest enough that it could be transferred this afternoon. So the obstacle is hardly ever the money. It is that nobody treated it as a step. It sat on a list between two things that felt more real, and the list got filed away. Let me also address the thing you said about nothing having gone wrong for five months, and the quiet is not evidence of anything, which is the part I would rather put bluntly than softly. From the outside, your company looks completely fine. It has a certificate. It can print letterhead and sign documents. Your customers, your suppliers and your bank are all dealing with it normally, because nothing visible distinguishes a company that has done this step from one that has not. So the position can sit there for months, or years, without anything happening. That is not the same as the position being fine. And the shape of the consequence matters more than the size of it, which I am not going to quantify on a call. Two things about that shape. Consequences in this part of company law tend to accrue over time rather than arrive as an event, which means nothing marks the day they begin. And they attach to individuals as well as to the company, which is a feature founders are very often unaware of until somebody mentions it. What exactly applies to you is a question for your company secretary or an advocate, and that is a short conversation now. On what you have already done in the five months, I will not give you a view, and saying that outright seems better than hedging. Whether anything you have signed, invoiced or received is affected, and in what way, turns on the particular document and the particular counterparty, which puts it squarely with an advocate. What I will tell you is that it does not improve by waiting, and that the conversation is short and inexpensive today and neither of those in a year. Now one more thing that catches almost everybody, and it is the part of this that is genuinely useful beyond the filing itself. This is usually the moment at which the address in your incorporation papers and the place your company actually sits have to be the same. Those two are very frequently different, for completely ordinary reasons. The address used at incorporation was a convenience. Your accountant’s office. A cousin’s flat. A co-working desk that nobody has visited since the second month. And it matters more than anything else on your file, for one reason. That is where notices go. Everything official reaches a company at its registered address, and something properly sent there is treated as having reached you whether or not anybody collected it. A company whose registered address is a flat nobody checks is a company that will one day be surprised by a letter that was sent six months earlier and was, as far as the system is concerned, delivered. So part of doing this properly is deciding the address question rather than inheriting it. If the address needs changing, that is its own piece of work and which of the two goes first is not interchangeable, so I would rather settle that in the first hour than trip over it in the third week. Finally, two practical things and then where I stop. First, put a founder on this, not a professional. This is the only filing in your first year that depends on one of you doing something personal, which is moving your own money. A reminder sent to your accountant does not move anybody’s money. A reminder sent to you does. Second, while you are at it, spend one afternoon listing the other one-time steps from the first year, with a name against each. Anything that happens once, early, produces no visible output, and is nobody’s routine is at risk in exactly the same way: this filing, your signing certificates and when they expire, your first statutory registers, the arrangement between the founders themselves. The first year of a company is the period with the fewest habits and the most one-time obligations, which is a poor combination and the reason that list is the cheapest hour you will spend. Where I stop: I will not tell you whether the requirement applies to your particular company, which depends on how and when it was formed, and I will not tell you what the delay costs. Both of those are for your company secretary or an advocate, and both are quick for them. What I do is establish the position from your documents and the public record, tell you what has to happen before anything can be filed and in what order, and then file it once the event has actually occurred and not before.

What this guide covers

  1. It exists, and it cannot begin
  2. The certificate is not permission
  3. Existence and capacity
  4. What you already have
  5. What you do not yet have
  6. It looks like a finish line
  7. It is a starting line
  8. The question for every milestone
  9. Built, or opened
  10. The step with no celebration
  11. What everything else produces
  12. A certificate, a letterhead, a bank
  13. And this one produces nothing
  14. So nobody marks it
  15. The general rule underneath
  16. The invisible-output problem
  17. Who in your team owns it
  18. The diary entry it needs
  19. It is proof of an event
  20. So it cannot come first
  21. What it has to rest upon
  22. The money has to arrive
  23. The delay is never the filing
  24. We will put it in later
  25. The sentence that stalls everything
  26. It was a promise, not an intention
  27. You made it to each other
  28. In your own documents
  29. The gap nobody can see
  30. From outside it looks fine
  31. Nothing signals the missing step
  32. People deal with you normally
  33. Which removes the warning
  34. Consequences accrue quietly
  35. And they fall on individuals
  36. What we will not quantify
  37. What happens in the gap
  38. The address rides along
  39. Where the form said you were
  40. Where you actually are
  41. The office and the cousin’s flat
  42. The moment both must agree
  43. What that changes later
  44. Notices go to the address
  45. Fix it now, or inherit it
  46. The order of operations
  47. What to do before trading
  48. What not to sign yet
  49. If you have already started
  50. What this page does not decide
  51. Six quiet failures
  52. An afternoon’s work, in most cases
  53. Who calls us about this one
  54. What we get in order first
  55. What we cannot backdate
  56. Whose job the rest is
  57. What we will not file on this
  58. Our fee on this filing
  59. And what comes next

It exists, and it cannot begin

Begin with the sentence that the whole of this page is an explanation of, because every difficulty here is a variation on it.

Your company is real. It has a name that nobody else in the country can take. It has a number. It has a date of birth. It has a PAN, it has a bank account, it has a rubber stamp somebody ordered without being asked to.

And on the day all of that becomes true, it still cannot lawfully start doing the thing it was made to do.

The certificate is not permission

Which runs against the most natural reading of the document you were sent.

A certificate of incorporation looks final. It is printed like an outcome. It arrives at the end of a process that took effort and money, and it names your company in a way that feels like the state has said yes.

It has said yes to something. It has said yes to the company being. What it has not done is say yes to the company acting, and those are two separate permissions that arrive at two separate moments.

Existence and capacity

Put the pair of ideas side by side once, plainly, because the rest of the page assumes you are holding both.

 ExistenceCapacity
What it meansThe company is a person in lawThe company may transact
Granted byIncorporationA separate later step
Evidence of itA certificate you were handedA filing nobody hands you
Feels likeThe finishNothing at all
Usually assumedCorrectlyIncorrectly

Read the last row. The error on this page is almost never a decision somebody made. It is an assumption nobody examined.

What you already have

And it is worth listing what incorporation genuinely did give you, because it is a great deal and the list is reassuring.

That is not a small inventory. It is why the mistake is so easy: looking at that list, no reasonable person would guess that something structural is still missing.

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What you do not yet have

What is missing is narrower than people fear and more fundamental than they expect.

The company has not yet told the registry that the thing it promised at formation actually happened — that the money the founders undertook to put in has been put in, and that the company is where it said it would be.

Until that declaration is on the file, the company is a shell that is lawfully in existence and not yet lawfully in business.

It looks like a finish line

Now the psychology of it, which matters more than it should.

Everything about the end of incorporation is shaped like an ending. The payments stop. The consultant goes quiet. Somebody sends a congratulatory message. The founders take a photograph of the certificate. The group chat changes its name.

In a process with a dozen steps, the one that feels like the last step will be treated as the last step, no matter what the sequence actually is.

It is a starting line

Whereas the honest description is almost the opposite of how it feels.

Incorporation is the gun going off, not the tape at the end. Everything that makes the company a working thing — the money in, the declaration on file, the registers opened, the first annual filings — sits after it, not before.

A starting line wearing the appearance of a finish line is the single most expensive shape in all of compliance, and no other file we handle shows it this cleanly.

The question for every milestone

So carry one question out of this page and put it against anything that arrives looking like an achievement.

Has this thing been built, or has it been opened?

Those are different events with different dates, and the gap between them is where obligations live quietly for months.

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Built, or opened

Because the distinction is not peculiar to companies, and seeing it elsewhere makes it harder to miss here.

A building can be complete and not occupied. A shop can be fitted out and not trading. A road can be laid and not opened. In each case there is a structure that plainly exists and a separate, duller, event that permits its use — and in each case the duller event is the one nobody photographs.

A company is the same object. The construction was the incorporation. The opening is a declaration on a file.

The step with no celebration

Which brings us to what we think is the real explanation for how common this is, and it is not carelessness.

Look at every other step in forming a company, and ask what each one handed you.

What everything else produces

Each one produces an object. That is the pattern, and it is worth seeing laid out.

StepWhat you got in your hand
Name approvalA letter with your name on it
Digital signaturesA token, a physical thing
Director identificationA number each person now owns
IncorporationA certificate, printed and dated
Tax registrationA card with a number
Bank accountA cheque book, a login, a balance
Indirect-tax registrationA registration number to put on invoices

Seven steps, seven objects. Every one of them tells you, without anybody saying so, that it is done.

A certificate, a letterhead, a bank

And objects are how people actually track progress, whatever the checklist says.

Nobody runs a formation off a register of completed obligations. They run it off a folder. The folder fills up with scans, and when the scans look complete, the process feels complete.

We have watched founders go through a drawer looking for the document that proves this step was done, which is a reasonable thing to do and cannot possibly succeed, because there is no document.

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And this one produces nothing

That is the whole of it, and it deserves to be said without decoration.

This step hands you no certificate. No number. No card, no token, no letter, nothing to print and nothing to frame. What it produces is an entry on a government file that you will never look at and that nobody will send you.

A filing whose only output is an absence of a problem is a filing that leaves no mark on your folder.

So nobody marks it

And an unmarked step is an unremembered step, which is where the months go.

The founders do not mark it because nothing arrived. The consultant may have mentioned it in an email in the week when nine other things were also mentioned. The accountant who takes over the books three weeks later inherits the folder, sees a complete-looking folder, and reasonably assumes the formation closed cleanly.

Nobody has been negligent. The step simply had no hook to hang a memory on.

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The general rule

Which generalises, and the generalisation is the most useful thing on this page.

In any process, the step most likely to be missed is the one that produces no visible output.

Not the hardest step. Not the most expensive. The invisible one. Test it against anything you run: the renewal nobody confirms, the register nobody reads, the declaration nobody receives. Those are the ones that go.

The invisible-output problem

And because it generalises, the fix generalises too, which is the only genuinely useful advice we can give here.

You cannot make the step produce an object. So you have to manufacture one. A line in a register with a date against it. A single-page note signed by whoever did it. A folder entry that exists for no reason except to be visible later.

Where the process will not give you evidence, create your own — which is, incidentally, the entire logic of statutory registers and minutes as a discipline rather than a chore.

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Who in your team owns it

With a practical point about whose job this is, because in most new companies the answer is nobody.

The person who formed the company has finished and moved to their next client. The person who will do the bookkeeping has not started and was not part of the formation. The founders are selling something.

This step falls in the handover gap between two professionals, which is the most reliable place in any company for an obligation to disappear. If you can name the person responsible for it, you have already avoided the problem.

The diary entry it needs

And the form of the reminder matters, which sounds trivial and is not.

A note to yourself does nothing, because the thing the note refers to depends on money moving and you are not the one who has to move it. A note to the accountant does nothing for the same reason.

The reminder has to reach the people who undertook to put the money in, and it has to say what it is for, because a reminder sent to somebody who cannot act on it is a record of good intentions and not a control.

It is proof of an event

Here is the second thing built into this step, and it is what fixes the sequence of everything below.

This filing is not a request. It is not an application for anything. Nobody considers it and grants it. It is a declaration — a statement by the company that something has already happened.

It is evidence of an event, not permission for one.

So it cannot come first

From which one consequence follows mechanically, and it catches almost everybody.

Evidence cannot precede the thing it is evidence of. You cannot declare that the money came in before the money came in, in the same way that you cannot write a receipt before a payment or a delivery note before a delivery.

So people who come to us wanting this “done quickly” are often asking for something that has nothing to do with speed. The filing is the fast part. The event is the slow part.

What it has to rest upon

Set out what has to be true in the world before the paper can honestly be prepared.

  1. The company has a bank account in its own name.
  2. Each person who undertook to contribute has actually transferred their contribution.
  3. The money went from that person to the company — not to a founder, not in cash, not from somebody else on their behalf.
  4. There is a bank record showing each transfer, identifiable as that person’s.
  5. The company’s registered address is settled, and is where the company can actually be reached.

Read item three twice. Contributions that arrive from the wrong account, or as cash handed to a director, are the single most common reason a file that looks ready is not ready.

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The money has to arrive

And the money is the heart of it, because that is the promise the registry is asking you to confirm.

At formation, a figure was written down. Each founder said, in the founding documents, how much they would put in. That figure was not an estimate of ambition. It was a stated commitment, and this step is where the company says the commitment was honoured.

Which is why there is no version of this that can be done on a company whose account has never been funded. There is nothing to declare.

The delay is never the filing

Say the useful sentence here, because it reorients what people chase.

Nobody is ever held up by this paperwork. They are held up by the event the paperwork describes.

When a company is three months past this and asking why, the answer is almost never a stuck filing. It is that one founder has not transferred, or transferred from a joint account, or sent the amount in parts from two different accounts, or paid an expense directly instead of funding the company.

We will put it in later

And the reason the money has not arrived is usually a single sentence somebody said in a meeting with the best possible intentions.

It is said early, it is said reasonably, and it is almost always said by somebody who is going to honour it. We are not going to suggest otherwise. Founders who say this generally do put the money in — eventually, and after the point where it mattered.

The sentence is not dishonest. It is just the wrong sentence to say about this particular commitment, for a reason worth spelling out.

The sentence that stalls everything

Because of where that figure was written and who it was written to.

A business decision you make and later revise is an internal matter. This figure is not that. It was recorded at formation, in documents filed with the registry, as a thing each subscriber would do. Deferring it is not deferring a plan; it is deferring the performance of something already stated on a public file.

And the deferral has no visible cost on the day it is made, which is why it extends so easily from a fortnight to a year.

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It was a promise, not an intention

So be exact about the character of that figure, because the exactness is what changes behaviour.

An intentionA promise
Held privatelyRecorded in a document
Revisable at willChanged only by a formal step
Owed to nobodyOwed to the other subscribers
Invisible if unperformedVisible against the file
Carries no dateCarries a starting point

Everything in the right column applies to the figure beside your name. Nothing in the left column does.

You made it to each other

And the promise was not principally to the government, which is the part founders find most sobering.

Three people agreed to build something together on a stated split. The split was expressed as money. If one of them does not put theirs in while the others do, the arithmetic underlying the shareholding has quietly stopped matching reality — and the shareholding is what the company is divided by.

That is a question between founders long before it is a question for a registry, and it is one of the better arguments for a co-founder agreement that says what happens if somebody does not fund.

In your own documents

With a small instruction we give almost everybody who reads this far.

Open the formation documents. Find the page where the subscribers are listed with amounts against their names. Most founders have never read that page, because somebody else prepared it and they signed where the flag was.

Whatever is on that page is what the company has to show happened. Not what you later agreed between yourselves, not what was said over a call — what is on the page.

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The gap nobody can see

Now the third structural fact, and the one that explains why this runs for years rather than weeks.

A company in this position has no symptom. There is no indicator anywhere, on anything anybody looks at, that distinguishes it from a company that completed every step.

The condition is entirely silent, and silent conditions are not noticed — they are discovered.

Outside, it looks fine

Go through what an outsider actually sees, because the list is complete and clean.

Your name appears on the register with your incorporation date. Your directors are listed. Your address is there. Your tax numbers check out. Your invoices look like invoices. Your bank account clears money. Your website says the right things.

Nothing an ordinary counterparty can see is wrong, because nothing an ordinary counterparty looks at carries this information in a form they would interpret.

Nothing signals the missing step

And the absence of a signal is not neutral. It is actively misleading.

If the bank refused to open the account, somebody would investigate. If invoices bounced back, somebody would ask. If a customer’s compliance team wrote in, the question would reach the founders. None of that happens.

A problem that produces no friction will be assumed not to exist, by everybody, including the people who could fix it in an afternoon.

People deal with you normally

Which is worth stating concretely, because the normality is the trap.

Customers place orders. Suppliers extend terms. A landlord signs a lease with the company as tenant. Somebody joins as an employee. A platform onboards you as a registered business. Each of those parties did a check, and each check came back clean, because none of them was checking this.

By the time anybody raises it, the company has a trading history, a staff list and a set of contracts, all built on top of the gap.

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Which removes the warning

So the ordinary mechanism by which businesses learn about their own problems is simply not operating here.

Most compliance failures announce themselves. A notice arrives. A portal blocks you. A number does not validate. A bank asks for a document. Those are irritating and they are also a service — they tell you something while it is still small.

Here there is no announcement, so the first information you get about the problem arrives at the worst possible moment: during a due diligence, a funding round, a tender, a bank review, or a dispute where somebody has a reason to look properly.

Consequences accrue quietly

And while nothing is being announced, the position is not static.

We are deliberately not going to put numbers or sections on this page, and we will say why further down. But the shape is worth knowing: this is not a single lapse that sits frozen at the size it was on day one. It is a continuing state, and continuing states grow.

The practical reading is simple enough. The cost of fixing this is lowest today and has never once been lower tomorrow. That is true whether the gap is three weeks or three years old.

And they fall on individuals

With one more point about where the consequences land, because founders assume the company absorbs everything.

A company is a separate person and it does carry its own liabilities. But obligations of this kind are also framed around the people who were supposed to see to them — the officers of the company, which in a new company means the founders themselves, by name, in their own capacity.

What exactly attaches to whom is a question for an advocate on your facts. That it can attach to a person and not only to the company is the part we want you to carry away.

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What we will not quantify

And here is the undertaking we make on this page, stated before you reach the part where you might expect numbers.

You will not find on this page: the section that governs this, the number of days allowed, the amount of any consequence, a daily rate, a description of how the form is filled, or a view on whether what you did during the gap stands or falls.

Not because it is secret. Because a figure read off a page and applied to facts nobody examined is worth less than nothing, and because those are the exact questions a company secretary, a chartered accountant or an advocate is answerable for and we are not.

What happens in the gap

Which brings us to the question founders actually ask, usually in a lowered voice.

They have been trading. There are invoices, receipts, a salary or two, possibly a signed contract of some size. They want to know whether all of that is now worthless.

We will not answer that, and nobody should answer it off a page. It depends on what was done, with whom, under what document, and what the other side knew — and it is an advocate’s question in the strict sense. What we will say is that it is a question worth asking early rather than at the point where somebody else asks it of you.

The address rides along

There is a second thing this step confirms, and it catches people who had the money sorted from day one.

Alongside the contribution, the company is confirming where it is. Not where it hopes to be. Where it is, as a matter of fact, on the day the declaration is made — a place that can be visited and where post arrives.

This is the moment at which the address on the register and the address in the world have to become the same address.

Where the form said you were

And for a very large number of new companies those two addresses were never the same thing.

At formation, somebody needed an address quickly, with a document to support it. Whatever was easiest to evidence went in. It was treated as a formality, filled in by the person doing the incorporation, and nobody present thought of it as a statement about the future.

Where you actually are

Meanwhile the company went and sat somewhere else, as companies do.

Two founders are working from one of their homes. Or a desk was taken in a shared office in a different part of the city. Or the operation runs out of a godown with no signboard. The business has a real location, and it is not the one on the file.

Nobody did anything wrong. The two facts simply drifted apart, in the weeks when everybody was busy with customers.

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The accountant’s office and the cousin’s flat

And there are two addresses we see more than all the others put together, so let us name them.

Neither is improper and we are not suggesting otherwise. Both have the same weakness: the address belongs to somebody whose incentive to forward your post is affection or a professional relationship, and both of those can end.

The moment both must agree

Which is precisely why this step is the right moment to confront it rather than a nuisance attached to it.

You are, at this point, making a statement about where the company is. If the honest answer is somewhere other than the file, then the file has to move — a registered office change — and it is enormously cheaper to do it now, as part of one exercise, than as a separate scramble in eighteen months.

Two facts that must agree, and only one chance to align them without it looking like a correction.

What that changes later

Because an address is not a label. It decides things, and it decides them silently.

What the address decidesWhy it matters
Where official post is sentYou are taken to have received it
Which office holds your fileWhose desk anything goes to
Where an inspection would comeAnd what would be there to see
Where records are presumed keptWhich is where somebody will ask for them
What appears on your invoicesAnd what a counterparty relies on
Where a dispute may be dealt withA question for an advocate, decided partly here

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Notices go to the address

And the first row of that table deserves its own section, because it is the one that actually hurts people.

A notice correctly sent to the registered address has reached the company. That is the rule in substance, and it does not pause because the address is a flat your cousin moved out of, or an office whose lease ended, or a desk you stopped renting.

The commonest version of this story: a letter arrived somewhere, somebody put it in a drawer or threw it away, and the company found out months later that it had been formally informed of something and had failed to respond.

Fix it now, or carry it

So we will put this one as an instruction rather than an observation, because we do not think it admits of much argument.

Decide today where the company actually is, and make the register say that. If the honest answer is a borrowed address, then at the very minimum there must be a named person who knows to tell you the moment anything arrives, and a check that does not depend on them remembering.

An address you have not thought about is a channel into your company that you are not watching.

The order of operations

Now the practical half, in the sequence it has to happen in.

  1. Read the formation documents and write down the figure against each subscriber’s name.
  2. Confirm the company’s own bank account is open and operating.
  3. Each subscriber transfers their own amount, from their own account, to the company.
  4. Collect a statement or advice showing each transfer separately and identifiably.
  5. Settle the registered address — and change it on the file first if it is wrong.
  6. Hand the whole set to whoever will prepare and certify the declaration.
  7. Keep a dated note in the company’s own records that this was done, because nothing else will mark it.

Steps one to five are yours and are where every delay lives. Step six is somebody else’s and is short. Step seven is the one nobody does and the one you will be glad of.

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What to do before trading

And a word about the period between incorporation and this being settled, since that is where most readers are standing.

The cautious course is the obvious one: get the money in and the declaration filed before the company starts taking on obligations in its own name. For most new companies that is a matter of a week or two if somebody simply makes the transfers.

What is or is not permissible during that fortnight is not something we will state, for the reason set out further up. We will say that the list of things worth postponing by two weeks is short, and the list of things not worth building on an unsettled footing is long.

What not to sign yet

With the handful of items where we would genuinely wait, offered as caution rather than as law.

Short invoices, a laptop purchase, a domain name: nobody sensible is going to ask you to unwind those. The list above is about commitments whose dates somebody will later line up against the file.

If you have already started

And if you are reading this having been trading for a year, which is the commonest way people arrive here, then the useful advice is different.

Do not go quiet about it, and do not let somebody talk you into papering over the dates. The gap is a fact with a date attached, it will be visible to anybody who looks properly, and the only version of this that gets worse is the one somebody tried to hide.

Two calls, in this order: a company secretary or chartered accountant, who will tell you what has to be filed and what the position now is; and an advocate, if anything of consequence was signed or committed in the gap. Not the other way round, and not neither.

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What this page does not decide

A page that explains a thing clearly can be mistaken for a page that settles it. This one settles nothing on the following, and the list is not short.

What we do is narrow by design: we get the facts and the documents into a state where the person answering those questions can answer them in one sitting instead of four.

Six quiet failures

From the files that have come to us, the six ways this actually goes wrong. Not one of them is a hard question.

What happenedWhat it looked like at the time
Money came in as cash to a directorHelpful — the account was not open yet
One founder’s share came from a spouse’s accountThe same family, so the same money
A founder paid company expenses directly insteadFaster than funding and then spending
Everybody funded except one, who would “do it next month”A timing matter between friends
Address on the file belonged to a consultant no longer engagedNever revisited, because nothing broke
Everything was done and nobody filed the declarationComplete, because the folder looked complete

Look at the right-hand column. In five of the six, somebody was being efficient. The sixth is the invisible-output problem from earlier in this page, operating exactly as described.

An afternoon’s work, in most cases

Which is why we think this is, in the ordinary case, among the cheapest things a new company ever fixes.

Three transfers from three accounts. One bank statement. One look at the address. One set of papers handed to a professional. For a company where the founders are reachable and willing, the real work is an afternoon, and the 1 – 3 days quoted is almost entirely other people.

The expensive version of this is not the fix. It is the year you spent not knowing.

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Who calls us about this one

The calls on this come in a small number of recognisable shapes, and the shape usually tells us how much time there is.

The last one is the cheapest file we handle on this subject. The first is the most anxious, and is usually fine.

What we get in order first

Our part of this begins before any paper is prepared, and it is mostly reading.

  1. Read the formation documents and extract the figure against each subscriber by name.
  2. Compare that against what has actually reached the company’s account, line by line.
  3. Identify every transfer that came from the wrong account, in the wrong name, or in the wrong form.
  4. Tell you plainly what is missing and who has to move money for it to stop being missing.
  5. Check the registered address against where the company is, and say if it needs changing first.
  6. Assemble the full set — documents, statements, the address position — into one file.
  7. Hand that to whoever will certify and file, and leave a dated note of it in your own records.

Nothing in that list requires a view on the law. All of it is the reason the person who does take a view can do so in one sitting.

What we cannot backdate

And one thing we will not do, stated here because somebody asks on roughly every second file of this kind.

Nothing we draft gets a date except the one it was genuinely made on. Not a resolution, not a note, not a receipt, not a consent. If the money moved in August, the papers say August.

The request is almost always innocent — somebody wants the file to look tidy. But a tidy file with a wrong date is the one document that turns an administrative gap into a question about honesty, and nobody trades an administrative gap for a credibility one on purpose.

Whose job the rest is

Every line below names somebody other than us, and that is not modesty. It is the division of work that makes this cheap.

Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.

What we will not file on this

And to be exact about the boundary, since this is a filing and we are describing our work on it.

We do not make the filing, we do not certify it, we do not state the period, we do not compute any consequence, and we do not tell you whether what happened in the gap stands. Those are the acts of a qualified professional with their own signature on the line, and the signature is the point.

Our contribution is that by the time the file reaches them, there is nothing in it they have to come back to you about.

Our fee on this

For getting this file into a state that can be filed — reading the formation documents and pulling out each subscriber’s committed figure by name, matching that against what has actually reached the company’s account, flagging every receipt that came from the wrong account or in the wrong form, telling you exactly who still has to transfer what, checking the registered address against where the company really is and saying whether it has to be changed before anything else, collecting the bank evidence in a form a certifying professional will accept, assembling the complete set as one file, drafting the board resolution and the register entries that should exist for this, and leaving a dated one-page note in the company’s own records so the step is finally visible — the fee is ₹999. Of the 1 – 3 days quoted, most of it is waiting for transfers to land and for a statement to be issued.

Priced separately, each for a reason:

Put plainly: what the fee buys is a file with no open questions in it. The filing is cheap and quick once the facts are clean. The expense on this subject is never the paperwork — it is the three rounds of correspondence caused by one transfer from the wrong account.

And what comes next

Once this is closed, the company stops being a thing that exists and becomes a thing that operates, and its obligations change character.

Everything after this is a calendar rather than an event: yearly filings, registers kept as you go, director confirmations. None of those has the same trap in it, because all of them recur and recurring things get diarised.

This step is the only one in a company’s life that happens exactly once, produces nothing, and has to be remembered by somebody who was never told it existed.

Close the step that produced no certificate

We read the formation documents, extract what each subscriber committed, match it against what actually reached the company’s account, flag every receipt that came in the wrong form, tell you who still has to transfer what, check the registered address against reality, assemble the whole set for a certifying professional, and leave a dated note so the step is visible in your own records. We do not make or certify the filing, state any period, or quantify any consequence.

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Why this page is written the way it is, and what it refuses to contain

Not on this page: the governing section, the period allowed, any consequence figure or daily rate, any description of the form or the portal, any statement of whether this applies to your company, any tax treatment, and any view on the validity of acts done before the step was completed. On a page about a specific statutory filing, that is close to everything a reader arrives expecting.

The reasons differ in kind, and only one of them is about things changing. The form, the portal and the mechanics are left out because they are revised and because a page that states them confidently misleads whoever reads it after the revision. The period and the consequence are left out for a stronger reason: a reader who finds a number here will do arithmetic against it, conclude they are fine or finished, and act on that conclusion without anybody having looked at their formation documents. And the validity question — whether what you signed during the gap holds — is left out because it is not a question that has a general answer at all. It depends on the document, the counterparty and what they knew, and it belongs to an advocate from the first sentence.

Clear the omissions away and the residue is what holds true on every file of this kind, and it happens to be the half nobody explains. That existence and capacity are two separate permissions arriving at two separate moments. That incorporation is a starting line built to look like a finish line. That every other step in forming a company hands you an object and this one hands you nothing, which is the entire mechanical reason it is forgotten — and that the general rule, good far beyond companies, is that the step with no visible output is the step that goes. That the filing is evidence of an event and therefore cannot precede it, so the delay is never the paperwork. That the subscribed figure was a promise made to the other founders in their own founding documents, not a private intention. That the condition is completely silent, so it is never noticed and only ever discovered, usually by somebody else. And that the registered address has to become true on the same day, because a notice correctly sent there has reached you whether or not anybody still lives at it. Not one of those sentences depends on a figure or a section number.

Why the invisible-output idea is the most useful thing here. If you remember one line, make it that one — because it will save you something else next year. The renewal nobody confirms, the register nobody reads, the declaration nobody receives: all of them fail the same way for the same reason, and the fix is always the same, which is to manufacture an output where the process gives you none. A dated line in a register is a strange thing to be proud of and it is the whole defence.

What to use instead of this page. For your own company: the formation documents themselves, which is the one source that actually settles what was committed and by whom, and which most founders have never read; a company secretary or chartered accountant for the filing, the period and the present position; your accountant for anything the funding or the allotment does to tax; an advocate if something of consequence was signed in the gap; and the company’s own bank statement, which is the only document that proves the event this filing is evidence of.

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Questions people actually ask

Our company is incorporated. We have the certificate. Somebody says there is still a filing before we can start. Is that right?
It is, and the distinction underneath it is worth getting clear because it explains everything else. Your company exists. That is not the same as your company being able to begin. Existence and capacity are two separate things, and incorporation delivers only the first. You have a certificate, a name, a number, probably a bank account — and there is one step between all of that and being permitted to start.
Why does nobody mention it at the time?
They usually do mention it, once, in a list. The reason it does not land is structural rather than anybody’s fault. Every other step in incorporation produces something you can hold — a certificate with a seal, a number, a letterhead, a cheque book. People congratulate each other. This one produces nothing at all. There is no artifact, no photograph, no moment. And the step with no visible output is the step that gets dropped, in this and in every process.
So incorporation is not actually the finish line?
It looks exactly like one, which is the whole difficulty. A sealed certificate arrives after weeks of paperwork, and everything about it reads as completion. It is a starting line with the appearance of a finish line, and the gap between those two readings is where this filing lives. We mention it on the first call for new companies, because the companies that get caught are the ones feeling pleased with themselves.
What does the filing actually say?
In substance it confirms that something has happened — that the money the founders subscribed for has actually been brought into the company, and where the company actually is. Which means it is proof of an event, not a request for permission, and that single fact changes the whole sequence: you cannot do it before the event it describes. The exact content is a matter for your company secretary or accountant; what matters here is its nature.
Then why do people get delayed on it? It sounds like a small filing.
Because the filing is never the thing that is late. What is late is the event the filing proves. In almost every delayed case we see, the paperwork could have been done in a day and the subscribed money had not been put into the company. So the question that unblocks this is not about forms at all. It is: has what the founders promised to put in actually gone in?
We said we would put the money in later. Is that a problem?
It is the commonest sentence in this subject and it is the thing that stalls everything. And it rests on a misreading worth correcting gently: that figure was not your intention. It was your promise — made in your own founding documents, to each other, in writing. Founders routinely treat the subscribed amount as notional because nobody asked for it on the day. It is not notional, and the filing is the point at which that becomes concrete.
It is a small amount. Does that make it easier or harder?
Easier, and that is the frustrating part. In most small companies the subscribed figure is modest enough that it could be transferred this afternoon. So the obstacle is almost never the money. It is that nobody treated it as a step — it sat on a list between two things that felt more real, and the list got filed. Once a founder understands what the figure is, this is usually resolved in a day.
Can you file it and we will put the money in afterwards?
No, and we would not. The filing states that something happened. If it has not happened, then what is being asked for is a document saying it did, which is not a thing we do at any price and for any client. The honest sequence is the short one: move the money, then file. That sequence takes a day longer and it is the only one available.
Nothing seems to have gone wrong. We have been operating for months.
That is the part of this we most want to flag, because the absence of trouble is not information here. From the outside your company looks entirely fine. It has a certificate. It can print letterhead and sign things. Customers, suppliers and banks deal with it normally. Nothing in the ordinary week signals that a step is missing, so the position can persist for a long time without anybody noticing — which is different from the position being fine.
What are the consequences of not having done it?
We are not going to put figures or specifics on a page, and the two things worth knowing are about shape rather than amount. Consequences in this area accrue over time rather than arriving as an event, so nothing marks the day they begin. And they attach to individuals as well as to the company, which is a feature of this part of company law that founders are routinely unaware of. What exactly applies to you belongs with your company secretary or an advocate.
We have already started trading. What should we do?
Deal with the step now rather than later, and ask one question of somebody qualified. Whether anything you have already done is affected, and in what way, is a legal question on your facts — not something we will answer, and not something to resolve by reading a page. What we can say plainly is that the position does not improve by waiting, and that the conversation is short and inexpensive now and neither of those later.
Does this filing have anything to do with our registered office?
Yes, and it is the part people are least prepared for. This is usually the moment at which the address in your incorporation papers and the place your company actually sits have to be the same. Those two are very frequently different, because the address used at incorporation was a convenience — an accountant’s office, a relative’s flat, a co-working desk nobody uses any more.
Does the address really matter that much?
More than anything else on your file, for one reason: that is where notices go. Everything official reaches a company at its registered address, and a notice sent there is treated as having reached you whether or not anybody collected it. A company whose registered address is a flat nobody visits is a company that will one day be surprised by something that was properly sent months earlier.
Our address has changed since incorporation. Is that a problem for this filing?
It is a thing to deal with rather than a problem, and the order of operations matters. Changing a registered office is its own piece of work and it may need to happen before or alongside this, depending on your situation. We establish which it is at the start rather than discovering it halfway through, because taking those two steps back to front is behind a good share of the files that drag on for a month.
Give me the honest timeline on this.
Once the transfers have landed and the papers are with us, reckon on 1 – 3 days. The timeline is almost entirely a function of one thing outside our hands — whether the subscribed amount has actually been transferred and whether the bank statement showing it is available. Companies that arrive with that done find this is a two-day piece of work. Companies that do not find that the two days are spent waiting on a transfer they could have made last week.
Who in our company should own this?
One named person, with a diary entry, and that entry belongs some weeks ahead of anything, not alongside it. The reason is specific: this is the only filing in a new company’s first months that depends on a founder doing something personal — moving their own money — rather than on a professional producing a document. A reminder to the accountant does not move anybody’s money. A reminder to the founder does.
Is this the same as the annual filings people talk about?
No, and confusing the two is why it gets postponed. Your annual filings are produced once a year from records, by somebody whose job that is, on a cycle. This is a one-time step that has to happen before the cycle begins, and it has no natural owner because the company has no routine yet. The first year of a company is the period with the fewest habits and the most one-time obligations, which is a poor combination.
What else is in the same category of one-time steps?
Several things, and we would rather list the shape than the items. Anything that happens once, early, produces no visible output, and is nobody’s routine is at risk in the first year: this filing, the signing certificates and their expiry, the first statutory registers, the arrangement between the founders themselves. One afternoon listing them, with a name against each, is the cheapest hour a new company can spend.
Is our company one of the ones this catches?
No, and a page that did should worry you. Whether a particular requirement reaches a particular company depends on how it was formed, when, and under what provisions, and anyone treating a published generality as the answer would be leaning on a sentence composed with no particular company in view. That determination belongs with your company secretary or an advocate, and it is a five-minute question for them.
Break the fee down. What lands on your desk and what lands on ours?
We establish the position first: whether the subscribed money has actually come in, whether the bank evidence exists, and whether your registered address matches reality. We tell you what has to happen before anything can be filed, and in what order. We prepare and file once the event has actually occurred, not before. And we leave you the one-page list of the other first-year one-time steps, with a name against each, which is the part clients tell us was worth more than the filing.
Our incorporation was handled by somebody else who has stopped replying.
We see that often, and it alters the starting point rather than the outcome. We would need the incorporation documents, whatever bank papers exist, and the signing certificates if they are still valid. Where documents cannot be obtained from the person who holds them, much of it can be established from the public record, which is the first thing we do rather than the last.
Say plainly where your work ends.
We will not prepare a filing stating that something happened before it has. No paper we draft will carry any date except the one it was actually signed on. We will not tell you whether the requirement applies to your company, or what the consequence of a delay is. We will not advise on anything you have already done in the meantime. And we will not file while your registered address is one we have been told is not where the company is.
Is there any way to make this faster?
One, and it is entirely yours: transfer the money today. Everything else in this is quick. We have never had a matter of this kind delayed by the filing itself; we have had plenty delayed by three weeks of conversation about whether the subscribed amount really needed to go in. It does, and the conversation costs more than the transfer.
Does any of this affect what we tell customers or investors?
It affects one thing, and it is worth knowing before a conversation rather than during one. Anybody looking carefully at a new company looks at its filings, and a missing early one is visible and easy to interpret badly. A company that did this on time has nothing to explain; a company that did it eighteen months late has a small thing to explain at the worst possible moment, which is usually while somebody is deciding whether to give it money.
What is worth sorting out before you start?
Three practical items. Confirm whether the subscribed amount has actually been transferred into the company account, from the statement rather than from memory. Decide the address question — where the company actually is, and whether that matches the papers. And check whether the signing certificates are still valid, because an expired one is a two-day delay discovered on day one. With those three settled, the rest is short.
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