Two names on a form for one.

Two names on one form

Start with the oddity, because it shapes everything else and because nobody raises it while you are being sold the structure.

The application for a company owned by exactly one person requires two names. Yours, as the person who owns it. And one more — the person who carries it on when you no longer can.

A form about working alone will not accept you working alone.

Notice also what that does to the order of thinking. Most founders arrive with a sequence in mind: decide the name, sort the documents, register, start working, and attend to the serious questions once there is something worth being serious about. This form reverses the last two steps. The gravest question in the list is the one you must settle before the lightest administrative ones, which is why so many people answer it with the first name that occurs to them.

It cannot be registered without one

And this is not a recommendation anybody makes to you. It is a condition of the thing existing.

Leave that field unanswered and there is no company. Not a company with a gap in its paperwork — no company at all. Succession is not an afterthought bolted on to this structure; it is one of the bricks.

Why other forms let you skip this

Which becomes interesting when you set it beside every other way of working alone.

Trade under your own name, or set up a firm, or run things informally, and nothing anywhere asks what happens afterwards. You can do it for thirty years and never answer the question. This is the one structure that will not begin until you have.

There is a reason behind it rather than bureaucratic habit. A company does not die; a person does. A company with exactly one owner has, at the moment that owner is gone, nobody left who can decide anything at all — not to sign, not to pay, not to close it. The gap is real, and the form fills it in advance.

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It is worth adding that the gap being filled is not a theoretical one. We have watched families spend months unable to do the smallest things with a business — not sell it, not close it, not pay a supplier who was owed money — because every one of those acts needed a decision and there was nobody with the standing to take one. The structure is trying to stop that happening, and the clumsiness of asking a thirty-four-year-old about their own death is the price of trying.

The question this form asks

So before anything else — before the name, the address, the documents, the fee — there is one question to answer honestly.

Who comes after me in this, and have they actually agreed?

Both halves matter and the second half is where almost everybody fails. The first half is a name. The second half is a conversation.

Who comes after you

And for most founders this is the first time they have been made to think about it at all.

You are thirty-four, the business is a month old, and a form is asking you to nominate your successor. It feels premature to the point of being morbid. It is neither — it is simply the one question this structure will not let you leave for later, and the discomfort is what makes people answer it carelessly.

And the first half is genuinely harder than it looks, because people choose by affection instead of by fitness. The right name is somebody who can be reached, who can act, who is likely to outlast you by a reasonable margin, and who would actually be willing. Those four things do not always sit on the same person as the one you are closest to, and that distance accounts for a great many of these quietly bad choices.

And have they actually agreed

Consent is part of the paperwork, not a courtesy. The signature is required.

Which sounds like a safeguard, and is one only to the extent that a signature represents something. A signature is easy to obtain. Understanding is not, and nothing in the process checks for it.

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A successor in the constitution

One last framing before we come to where it goes wrong, because it is the thing worth remembering about this whole structure.

In most lives, what happens to a business afterwards lives in a will, written late, kept private, read once. Here it lives in the company’s own founding papers, written on day one, on record. Whatever else this form is, it is the only business vehicle that is born with an answer to its owner’s death.

That is not the same conversation as a will, and it does not replace one. It is narrower and earlier and it concerns one asset only.

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The name written without a talk

Now the defect itself, which across the files we have seen is what is wrong with these companies more often than anything else.

The field appears. A name is needed. The founder supplies the first person they trust — a brother, a wife, a sister, a father — and the application proceeds.

At no point does anything ask whether that person grasped what they were agreeing to.

Part of the difficulty is that the founder is not asking a serious question at that moment, in their own mind. They are clearing a field on a form. The weight of what is being asked becomes visible only in retrospect, usually to somebody else, which is a very hard thing to correct by telling founders to be more careful. What works is a rule rather than carefulness: do not write the name on the day you learn you need one.

A question asked at a lunch

And when the conversation does happen, it usually happens in the lightest possible register.

“I am registering the business, I need to put somebody’s name, is it all right if I put yours?” Over tea, between other things, answered with a shrug and a yes. Both people leave that exchange having had completely different conversations.

There is an asymmetry here that is worth naming. For you this is one field in one application among several dozen things you are doing that month. For them, if it ever becomes live, it is the only thing on the page and it arrives with no preparation at all. A decision that is small on one side and large on the other deserves the ten minutes it takes to make it mutual.

What that person is taking on

We are deliberately not going to describe the effect of the position, because that belongs to the professional who incorporates you and it is their statement rather than ours.

What we will say is the shape of it, which is enough to make the point. It is not a gift and it is not ownership. It is a place in the structure that becomes relevant in exactly one circumstance — and that circumstance is the worst day their family will have.

Which is why a vague yes is worse than useless. The one moment this name exists for is a moment when nobody has the patience to discover a surprise in the company’s papers.

Four things to tell them first

So before the name goes anywhere, four sentences. This is the most useful item on the page and it costs nothing but nerve.

1. What the position is, as your professional has described it to you.
2. What would land on them, and roughly when.
3. That it is a responsibility and not a benefit.
4. That they may say no, with no awkwardness, and you will write somebody else.

The fourth is what makes the first three honest, and it is the one founders leave out. If you cannot imagine saying all four to the person, that is information about the choice of person — and nothing bad about them at all.

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The relative who said yes vaguely

The failure mode is not dramatic, which is exactly why it persists for years.

Nothing goes wrong. The company trades, the filings get done, the name sits in the papers untouched. The defect is entirely invisible until the one day it is not, and on that day nobody is in a position to repair it.

The other version, less painful and more common, is simply confusion. Somebody is asked to do something, does not understand why they rather than anybody else, suspects there has been a mistake, and spends weeks establishing what everybody else already knows. Nothing is lost permanently. A family that did not need an extra month of uncertainty gets one, and the cause was a conversation nobody had four years earlier.

When they find out late

And the version of this we would least want any family to go through is specific.

Somebody learns about their position in a business from an accountant, or a bank, or a letter, while they are in the middle of a bereavement. They are not refusing out of unwillingness; they are refusing out of not having known. And the person who could have explained it is the person who is gone.

Changing the name later

With the reassuring half, because this is fixable and founders often assume it is not.

The name is not permanent. It can be changed, and changing it is ordinary administrative work rather than a reconstruction. Which means a name chosen badly today is a problem with a cheap solution, provided somebody notices it.

Why a name goes stale

And noticing is the whole difficulty, because nothing prompts you.

No letter arrives. No filing asks you to confirm it. The name you wrote in your first week sits there through every change in your life and in theirs, exactly as it was, looking exactly as current as the day it was written.

It is worth being clear that none of this means the first choice was wrong. A name that suited your life in your first year and does not suit it in your sixth was a perfectly good choice that an ordinary amount of time happened to. The failure is never in choosing; it is in choosing once and treating the choice as finished, which is exactly what a form that never asks again encourages you to do.

A marriage, a death, a move

Here is what actually makes a perfectly sensible choice stop being one.

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Review it when life changes

So one habit, and it is the cheapest piece of protection in this structure.

Put it on whatever annual list you already look at — alongside the registers, the accounts and the filing dates. One line a year: is that still the right name, and does that person still know? Nobody has ever regretted the two minutes.

One person describes ownership

Now the misreading that costs money rather than feelings, and it starts with two words in the name of the thing.

“One person” is a statement about who holds it. That is the entire content of the phrase.

It describes the ownership. It makes no claim at all about the obligations.

The phrase is doing something unusual, if you look at it. Most business forms are named after what they are — a partnership, a trust, a society. This one is named after how many people own it, which is a fact about the shareholder register rather than about the thing itself. A name that describes the owner instead of the entity invites exactly the misunderstanding that follows, and the misunderstanding is almost universal.

Not workload, not formality

And founders read it as all three, which is an understandable mistake and an expensive one.

The expectation is a lighter year: fewer filings, less formality, something between a freelancer and a company. What arrives is a company’s year with one owner in it.

You can see where the expectation comes from in the way the choice is usually presented. It appears in comparison tables beside sole proprietorship, as the slightly more serious option on that side of the page, rather than beside the private limited company, which is where it actually belongs. Put in the wrong column, it reads as a formalised freelancer. Put in the right one, it reads as what it is: a company with an unusual ownership rule.

It is still a company

Said as plainly as we can, because this is the sentence we would most want somebody to read before paying anybody.

This is a company. Not a company-shaped arrangement, not a registration, not a simplified version. A company, with everything that attaches to being one, and the only thing that is simpler is the number of people who own it.

A separate legal person

Which rests on one idea that takes founders a year to absorb properly.

The company and you are two different legal entities that happen to share an address, a phone and a bank relationship. Its money is its money. Its contracts are its contracts. Its obligations are its own. You are the owner and also the officer, and those are two roles in one head.

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None of which is an argument against it. A great many one-person businesses are properly served by this form and are glad of it — for the separateness, for how they are treated by the businesses they invoice, for being able to hold things in the company rather than personally. The argument is only against choosing it while expecting a lighter year, because that expectation is the one that produces an unpleasant eighth month.

The filings do not shrink

And the practical consequence arrives in the first full year, usually as a surprise.

There are accounts to prepare, filings to make, registers to maintain and dates that do not move for anybody. We print no list and no deadline on this page, because those are revised and because your professional will give you yours. What we will say is that the quantity of it does not reduce because you are one person.

It is the same material a private limited company produces, and the habit that makes it survivable is bookkeeping kept monthly rather than reconstructed annually.

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The registrar still counts

With the part that founders discover late and resent most, fairly.

Nobody writes to tell you that you are behind. The consequence of a late filing is not usually an argument about whether you should have filed — it is a figure that accumulates while nothing is happening, and nothing about the business being small or dormant pauses it.

Stopping trade is one thing and stopping existence is another; the obligations follow the second, not the first. If you later decide this was the wrong vehicle, take it out through a formal closure instead of walking away — walking away is the dearest exit available.

What founders expected instead

The gap between expectation and reality is consistent enough to put in a table.

The most practical thing to do about it is unglamorous: ask whoever will do your compliance to write down, before you register, what the first full year actually involves and what they will charge for it. Not an estimate over the phone. A list, with their fee against it. Founders who have that page in front of them never have the eighth-month conversation, and it costs nothing to ask for.

Where that belief comes from

And it is worth being fair about the source, because founders are not being foolish.

The name says one person. The marketing says simple. The comparison tables say fewer compliances than a private limited, which is true in a narrow sense and is read as a general promise. Nobody lies; the words simply carry more weight than they can bear.

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The only check on you is you

Now the feature of this structure that is hardest to see from inside it, and we would put it near the top if we were ordering by long-term consequence.

Every decision in this company is taken by one person, recorded by that person, and reviewed by nobody.

Elsewhere, somebody has to agree

Which is easier to see by looking at what an ordinary company has that this one does not.

There, certain things cannot happen until a second person concurs. That requirement is experienced as friction and resented accordingly. It is also the mechanism by which a bad idea gets a second reading before it becomes a commitment. A board resolution exists partly to make somebody say the thing out loud.

There is a milder version of this that applies long before anything goes wrong. In a company with two people, somebody has to be told what was decided, which means it has to be put into words. Putting a decision into words is most of what makes it a decision rather than an impulse. Remove the listener and the words become optional, and what is optional at nine in the morning on a busy day does not happen.

Here nobody does

And here that mechanism is simply absent.

Not weakened, not reduced to a formality — absent. There is no second person to persuade, which means there is no second person to be unpersuaded either.

Which sounds like freedom

And is, mostly, and is the honest reason many founders choose this.

No negotiation, no explaining, no waiting for somebody to be available. A decision at nine in the morning is a decision by nine-fifteen. That speed is a real advantage and it is the thing the structure is actually good at.

The cost is not that you will decide badly. It is that nothing in the structure distinguishes a decision you thought about from one you took while annoyed, and a year later neither of them left a trace.

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The paragraph nobody wrote

Which brings us to the recommendation founders find strangest on this page.

Keep minutes. Of your own decisions. In a company where you are the only person in the room, with nobody to read them.

Founders sometimes object that this is make-believe — a meeting of one person, minuted by that person, approving what they had already done. The objection is fair as a description and wrong as a conclusion. Nobody is pretending a debate happened. What is being created is a dated statement of what was decided and on what basis, and its usefulness comes from the fact that nobody except its author was in a position to make it.

Records you keep for yourself

And the reason is not compliance theatre, although the registers are their own requirement.

It is that two years out, a paragraph written on the day is the only thing that will show a decision was deliberate and when it was taken. Memory does not survive the question, and in a sole-owner company your memory is the entire corporate record unless you write something down.

The decision with no witness

With the three situations in which this stops being abstract.

• A buyer, a lender or an investor asking how and when something was decided.
• A dispute in which the date of a decision matters more than its merits.
• Your own accountant, a year later, asking why a payment was made.

None of those is a crisis if a paragraph exists. All of them are uncomfortable if it does not, and the discomfort is not about honesty — it is about having nothing to point at.

The same logic applies to anything you agree with yourself about money — what you intend to draw, on what footing, and how often. Written down once at the start, it becomes a policy that your accountant can work with. Left unwritten, it becomes twelve separate improvisations that somebody has to interpret a year later, and interpretation is the expensive part of accounting.

Why to minute it anyway

So the habit, described small enough to actually be kept.

A date, what was decided, and one line on why. Four lines a month in a single file. That is all of it, and it separates a company that has a history from a company that merely has a bank statement. Where the statutory registers are concerned there is a separate and stricter requirement, and the two sit comfortably in one place.

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The money question

And one specific consequence of the separate-person idea that catches almost every first-time sole founder.

The company earns, the money arrives in the company’s account, and you need some of it. That is not a pocket-to-pocket movement, however much it feels like one.

What drawing it is called

Which route is right is an accountant’s judgement on your own numbers, so no answer to it is coming from us — and a wrong answer here is the sort that compounds rather than sits still.

What we will say is that there are different routes, they are treated differently, and the one thing that is never right is taking money with no description at all. Ask the question in month one, not at the first year end when a decision has already been made twelve times by default.

It is also the single commonest cause of a first year costing more in professional fees than the founder budgeted. Not the filings themselves, which are reasonably predictable, but the hours somebody spends working out what a year of undescribed movements between two accounts was supposed to represent. That work is charged at a professional rate and it is entirely avoidable at the time it occurs.

And why it needs a name

Because the alternative is a year of entries that nobody can classify.

An accounts conversation that starts with twelve unexplained transfers is a longer and dearer conversation than one that starts with twelve labelled ones. The labelling costs nothing at the time and cannot be done afterwards from memory.

The form has a size

Now the feature that turns a good decision into a wrong one over time, and it is a matter of design rather than anybody’s fault.

This structure is built for a scale. Beyond that scale it stops being the right container, and the stopping is not gradual.

No limit is printed here. These limits get revised, and a number on a web page keeps shaping people’s plans long after it has moved.

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And the reason we will not print a number is not caution for the sake of it. A threshold on a page becomes a planning assumption: founders arrange a year around staying below a figure they read somewhere, discover it has moved, and have either restricted the business for nothing or crossed a line they did not know had shifted. The figure is available, in current form, from the professional who will certify your filings, and that is the only version worth having.

Growth is not neutral here

Which is the unusual part, because for most business forms growth is simply good news.

Sell more as a firm and nothing structural happens. Sell more here and at some point the container itself has to change. Success is the thing that eventually breaks the arrangement, which is a strange sentence and a true one.

Outgrowing it is an event

And it is handled, routinely, by professionals, with no drama attached.

What it is not is free. There is work, there is cost, there is a period of attention, and all of it arrives in the year you are busiest, because the year you outgrow the form is by definition a good year.

What makes it manageable is almost entirely preparation, and the preparation is the same housekeeping this page has been recommending for other reasons. Records that are current, decisions that were written down, accounts that were not reconstructed in a hurry. A business whose history is legible converts cheaply; a business whose history has to be assembled first pays twice, once to assemble it and once to use it.

Not a milestone but a filing

With the framing we would want a founder to carry.

Nobody congratulates you. There is no moment. What there is, is a set of forms, a professional’s time and a bill, in the middle of a quarter when you have no spare attention — and the only way to make that cheap is to have seen it coming.

Choose for the year after next

From which the one piece of actual decision advice on this page follows, and it is a question rather than an answer.

Pick the structure that fits where you expect to be in three years, not where you are in this month.

That is harder and it is cheaper. The form that fits a first year perfectly and a third year badly costs you a restructuring; the form that is slightly heavy in year one costs you a little patience.

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Which is worth putting the other way round as well, because this page risks reading as discouragement. A founder who answers no, no and individuals to those three questions has a strong candidate here and should stop worrying about the rest of this section. The warnings are aimed at the founder who answers maybe, and the whole point of asking early is that maybe is cheap to resolve now and expensive to resolve in year three.

Where that planning starts

And it starts with three questions you can answer yourself before paying anybody for an opinion.

1. Is there any realistic chance of a second person joining?
2. Will you ever want outside money in it?
3. Who are you going to be selling to — individuals, businesses, or institutions that run vendor checks?

Those three answers do most of the work. A professional settles the rest in one conversation, and an online consultation before registration is better value than the same conversation after it.

What changing form costs

One honest note so this does not read as a warning against the structure, which it is not.

Plenty of businesses start here properly and move on later, and that is a perfectly good outcome rather than a mistake. What it is not is a free option, and the founders who find it painless are the ones who knew it was coming and had kept their records in a state that made it easy.

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You cannot add a partner

Now the limitation we would most want settled before anybody registers anything, and it is the one that catches good businesses.

A second owner cannot be brought into this form. Not with paperwork, not with goodwill, not with a side agreement.

It is also the ambition founders are least able to predict about themselves. Almost nobody starting alone expects to want a partner; a fair number of them want one within three years, usually because the business turned out to need a skill they do not have. Betting that your own preferences will hold for three years is a reasonable bet in most contexts and a slightly worse one here, because the cost of being wrong is structural rather than inconvenient.

The one thing success brings

Which collides directly with what happens to a business that works.

The first thing a growing one-person business usually wants is another person in it — a partner who brings the other half of the skill, or capital, or the client relationships. That is the most ordinary ambition in business, and this is the one structure that forbids it.

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And the form that forbids it

So the two facts have to be put next to each other, early, while the choice is still open.

You can change structure to accommodate the person. What you cannot do is keep this one and add them. Which converts a question about convenience into a question about intention.

Do you intend to stay alone?

And that is the question to ask instead of the one most founders ask.

Not: is this the cheapest and simplest way to register a business by myself? But: do I intend to be by myself in two years?

A yes makes this a sensible candidate. A maybe is worth half an hour with somebody qualified before anything is filed, and the half hour is cheaper than the restructuring by an order of magnitude.

Two founders and one name

Which brings us to an arrangement we are asked about often and will not help build.

Two people are starting something. One goes on the papers as the owner. The other is a partner in practice — working, contributing, taking a share — and appears nowhere.

And we would rather say this part bluntly than tactfully. The person most at risk in that arrangement is usually the one who proposed it, because they are the one who thought it was a technicality. The person on the papers is not planning anything; they simply hold everything, and holding everything is a position you drift into rather than choose. By the time anybody is unhappy, nobody did anything wrong and the paper is still the paper.

The arrangement that looks tidy

And the reasons it is proposed are usually innocent, which is what makes it tempting.

It is simpler to register. One person has the documents in order and the other does not. Somebody is salaried elsewhere. Somebody will “come on later”. Every one of those is a real reason and none of them makes the arrangement safe.

Why it unravels

It survives for exactly as long as the business is not worth arguing about.

The paper says one owner. The understanding says two partners. While things are good nobody looks at the paper. At the point where anybody looks, the paper is what exists — and the person who is not on it discovers what they have been relying on.

We will not design that structure, and we would say the same to both people in it. If two of you are genuinely in business together, that belongs in a form that can hold two names, or in a written arrangement settled by an advocate before anything is filed — not in a handshake stretched over a document that contradicts it. A partnership deed or an LLP exists precisely for this situation.

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What we do not decide for you

Which is the right point to be exact about where our part ends, since this page has been full of decisions.

We do not choose your structure, confirm your eligibility, state any limit, compute anything, or form a view on who your nominated person should be. Those are not things we are being modest about — they are somebody else’s work.

None of those handoffs is us declining work. A structure decision taken by a registration service, on a web form, with no sight of your figures or your plans, is worth exactly what it cost, and the founder pays for it two years later rather than at the time. Handing it to somebody who is answerable for the advice is the only version of this that protects you.

Whose desk this choice is on

Set out so you know who to ring for what.

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 do not advise on

Setting out, plainly, the things you may have come here hoping to be told and will not be.

• Whether this structure is right for you rather than another.
• Whether you are eligible to use it.
• What any threshold, limit or provision says.
• What tax applies, or how you should draw money.
• What the nominated position does in law.
• Whether any particular person should be named.
• What it will cost you in professional fees beyond our own.

Every item there is a professional judgement, a moving figure, or a call that only you can make. Put an answer on a web page and somebody acts on it as advice, with nobody qualified having looked at their situation — which is the harm, not the inaccuracy.

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Six quiet assumptions

And a last table of how this goes wrong, taken from founders who reached us after choosing rather than before.

Not one of those is carelessness. Each is a sensible reading of a structure whose name promises simplicity and whose paperwork quietly assumes you thought about your own death in week one.

The honest summary of all of it is that this form suits a narrower set of people than its name suggests, and suits them very well. It is a poor fit for somebody who wants lighter compliance, a poor fit for somebody who may want a partner, and a good fit for somebody who intends to work alone and wants the separateness and the standing that a company gives them when they invoice other businesses.

Who rings us about this one

The people who order this arrive in a handful of recognisable situations.

• A freelancer of several years who now needs to invoice businesses that will not deal with an individual.
• Somebody whose accountant said company and who has not been told which kind or why.
• A founder who already registered, wrote a relative’s name without asking, and has started to worry about it.
• Somebody with a friend circling the business, who has not yet worked out that this form cannot hold them.
• A first-time founder whose documents disagree with each other and who does not know that is the whole delay.

The third and fourth are the ones we are gladdest to take early. Both are cheap to fix before filing and tiresome afterwards.

What we get ready first

And the order of work matters, because the first item decides whether the rest is worth doing.

1. Your documents read against each other — names, spellings, addresses, dates — before anything is submitted.
2. The registered-address proof with whatever consent has to accompany it, obtained rather than assumed.
3. The nominated person’s consent, after you have had the conversation.
4. Name options checked for obvious conflict, including against the trade-mark position, so a rejection does not arrive as a surprise.
5. Signatures and the digital signature arranged for whoever has to sign.
6. A written schedule of what follows incorporation, each item with its own date.

That last item is the one founders thank us for later. Existing and being permitted to begin are two separate events, and the step between them is easy to miss because nothing visible happens when you complete it — the commencement filing page covers that in full. The same schedule carries the GST, bank account and MSME steps where they apply, and startup registration where it is worth having.

The consent we will not assume

One rule of ours on this particular file, and it occasionally slows a founder down by a week.

We will not treat a nominated person’s consent as given because you have told us it is fine. We ask for it from them, in the form it has to take, after you have spoken to them properly.

If that produces an awkward week, the week is the point. A consent we assembled around somebody who had not understood it would be the one defect in the file that nobody discovers until it cannot be fixed. And nothing is dated earlier than it happened — not a consent, not a resolution, not an address proof.

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Whose sign on which paper

To be exact, since three different people sign things in this exercise and only one of them is you.

You sign as the owner. Your nominated person signs their own consent, themselves, having read it. Whoever holds the premises signs the address consent. And the certifying professional signs what requires a membership number, which is theirs and not available to anybody else.

Our name is on none of it. We assemble, check and schedule; we do not sign, certify or appear.

What we never certify here

With the discipline inside that, because on company work the line is easy to blur.

We do not state that you are eligible, that a document is sufficient, that a name is available, or that anything complies. Those are certifications, and a certification from the people who assembled the file would be worth nothing. What we give you instead is a written list of anything we think a professional should look at before it goes in.

One last practical note that belongs nowhere else. Keep a single folder, from the first day, containing the incorporation papers, the consents, the registers, the minutes and every filing acknowledgement. Not because anybody will ask for it soon, but because every one of the events this page has described — changing the name, converting the form, bringing somebody in, closing it, selling it — begins with somebody asking for that folder. The businesses that have it spend days on those events. The businesses that do not spend months.

Our fee, on the file

And the money, put the way we put it everywhere here.

We charge ₹6,999 for preparing and checking the file as described, normally ready inside 7 – 15 days. It is not a government fee, not a professional certification fee, and not contingent on registration being granted, which is not ours to grant.

Government charges, stamp duty where it applies and the certifying professional’s fee are separate and are paid by you to them. Ask that professional for their whole figure in writing before you engage them — incorporation, the commencement step and the first year’s compliance — because quotes are nearly always for the first of those three, and it is the third that catches people out. Where the business later needs a capital increase, a share transfer or a tidy file of its own history, that history is only as good as the records kept from month one. An authority letter is usually the first thing a bank asks for afterwards.

Whichever form you choose, the protection is given back the same way. Private limited company registration covers the personal guarantee — why the bank, the landlord, the supplier and the lessor each ask for one, and why nobody uses the word while it is happening.

If the purpose is charitable rather than commercial, a one person company is the wrong shape entirely. Our section 8 company guide explains the form that fits, and the three constraints worth hearing before you commit to it.

If an LLP is also on your shortlist, read its annual side before deciding. Both LLP filings are owed because the LLP exists rather than because it trades, and the statute names the designated partners in the penalty — our LLP annual return guide covers it.

An LLP cannot be a one-person structure for long — section 6(2) makes the sole remaining partner personally liable once the firm has traded alone for more than six months knowing it. Our LLP registration guide covers that, and the agreement defaults that apply before anybody notices.

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Questions people actually ask