Are you a young entrepreneur developing a new business?
Setting up a business is an adventure that requires compliance with a number of compulsory stages, all of which must be completed in a precise order.
Focus today on the calendar of formalities for incorporating a company!
The first step in setting up a business is of course to draw up a draft of the company's articles of association. This enables the founding partners to put their project into practice.
The duration of this stage varies according to the characteristics of the project in question: drafting may take a few hours for relatively simple articles of association such as those of a SASU or EURL, but may require several weeks' work for other legal forms.
The draft bylaws must finally be signed by all associates.
Determining your company's registered office is also an essential step. The registered office, which refers to your company's administrative, tax and legal address, has both a practical and a more strategic role in representing the company.
Such a location must therefore be carefully determined
There are several alternatives available to entrepreneurs: domiciling their head office in commercial premises, in a domiciliation company or in their own home.
Thirdly, it will be essential to determine the company's share capital contributions.
Indeed, until these funds have been finalized, the company's articles of association cannot be completed, as they must specify the contributions in cash and in kind.
There are two types of contribution to share capital: cash and in-kind.
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The deposit of cash contributions, which correspond to direct cash contributions, is not extremely complex and can be finalized in a very short time. The person in charge of receiving the funds is responsible for depositing them on behalf of the company at a caisse de dépôt et de consignation, a bank or a notary's office, within a few days.
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The situation is different for contributions in kind, which correspond to contributions other than cash (often goods). Valuation will vary according to the size and nature of the asset. This may require the intervention of a contribution auditor.
Once the above steps have been completed, the articles of association can finally be signed by the partners.
Once the articles of association have been signed, the company is deemed to be incorporated.
There is no statutory deadline for completing this procedure. In most cases, however, this stage is completed relatively quickly, so that the formalities relating to the company's registration with the Registre du Commerce et des Entreprises (RCE) can be tackled .
Officers may not be named in the articles of association.
In this case, it is essential to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.
Again, there is no legal deadline for this, but in practice, it is true that the appointment of directors not mentioned in the articles of association should be made as soon as the articles of association have been signed , so that the company has a legal representative.
If you are setting up a commercial business, you will need to take additional steps, for which you will have to pay:
- To begin with, you'll need to publish an ad in a JAL or Jounal d'Annonces Légales. The cost of such an ad can range from 90 to 200 euros on average.
- Next, you' ll need to register your company with the RCE. There is a charge for this at the Greffe du Tribunal de Commerce in the département where the company is headquartered. It costs 83.64 euros.
After completing the administrative formalities described above, it's time to fill in the M0 form for declaring the creation of a company.
The form is available online, which saves time.
Please note that if you are affiliated to the Régime Social des Travailleurs Indépendant (self-employed workers' social security scheme), you must attach a TNS form, duly completed and signed.
Finally, you can take the final step: registering the company.
It goes without saying that this step cannot be carried out unless all the previous steps have been duly completed. Once all the supporting documents have been assembled to form the registration file, an application for registration can be made.
If any documents are missing, the Registrar's Office will come back to you to ask for them, which must be supplied within 15 days. Failure to comply with these instructions may result in refusal of registration.
On the contrary, if your application is complete, your company will be registered very quickly, and the K-Bis extract is usually received quickly.
By the same token, setting up a company is complex and requires care and diligence, even after registration.
Indeed, even if the latter is very often seen as a focal point to be reached to get out of adminsitrative formalities and start capitalizing on one's business, steps still need to be completed afterwards, in the image of the declaration of beneficial owners mandatory since August 2017.
Written by our expert Quentin Moyon
May 28, 2018
