Businesses

Your entity is the starting point

A company, LLP, partnership and proprietorship have different governance and record-keeping arrangements. An entity’s incorporation does not by itself answer questions about tax registrations, workers or premises.

• Identify the contracting entity and its owners.
• Map registrations to actual activities and locations.
• Separate recurring filings from event-driven decisions.

Use both your legal structure and your business situation

Some entries below describe a legal structure; others describe the stage or ownership of a business. You may need more than one. A funded private limited company, for example, can use its company page for governance and recurring records, and the funded-company page for investor reporting and ownership changes.

• Structure: begin with your proprietorship, partnership, LLP, company, trust, society or cooperative records. Check the exact registered name and form rather than relying on a trading name.
• Ownership and stage: use the startup, funded-company, family-business or foreign-owned-business pages for the decisions and handoffs that arise in that situation.
• Operating footprint: a multi-state business needs a location view alongside its entity records. Size or an MSME description alone does not identify every applicable obligation.

If you are still choosing a structure, the entity comparison helps organise the questions to discuss. If the entity already exists, work from its actual records before considering a conversion or a new registration.

Build an entity record before a handover

Keep a concise index of the formation documents, ownership records, authorised signatories, registrations and current advisers. For each recurring task, identify the period covered, the latest completed output and the owner of the next action. An index makes missing records visible without circulating the entire document archive.

• Match bank accounts, contracts and registrations to the correct entity.
• Identify changes since the last completed filing or reporting period.
• Record pending notices, applications and unresolved reconciliations.
• Separate the entity's obligations from those of founders, partners or other group businesses.

Revisit the position when the business changes

A new investor, location, activity or employing arrangement can create a different set of questions from the ordinary annual cycle. For a family business bringing a new company into an existing group, first map which entity owns assets, employs staff and signs customer contracts. A shared brand does not make those records interchangeable.

Use business journeys for the sequence around a change, industry guidance for the operating model, and state guidance for the location. These views complement the audience pages below.