Plain-English guides to registering, running and staying compliant as a business in India.
An LLP agreement is the contract between the partners, and between the partners and the LLP, that sets out who contributes what, how profits are shared, who manages, and how people join and leave. Section 23 of the Limited Liability Partnership Act, 2008 makes it the governing document for those relationships, and it must be
GST registration is not national. A GSTIN starts with a two-digit State code followed by your PAN, and it covers one State or Union territory. You need a separate registration in each State from which you make supplies. Selling into a State is a different matter. A business that only bills or ships to customers
Authorised capital is the ceiling: the maximum share capital your company may issue, as written in its memorandum. Paid-up capital is what shareholders have actually paid for the shares the company has issued. A company registered with ₹10 lakh authorised capital and ₹1 lakh paid-up has issued shares worth ₹1 lakh and has room to
“Abandoned” means the Trade Marks Registry has stopped processing your application because a step that was yours to take was not taken in time. It is not a decision that your mark is unregistrable. It is a procedural end, and that cuts both ways: the merits were never decided, but the filing date you had
Your company comes under the Registrar of Companies (ROC) for the place where its registered office is. Not where the founders live, not where the business operates, and not the office that processed your incorporation. In most states there is one ROC for the whole state. In a few, the state is now split between
Udyam registration is the government’s record that your business is a micro, small or medium enterprise (MSME). It is done online on the Udyam portal using the owner’s Aadhaar and the business’s PAN, with investment and turnover figures drawn from income tax and GST records. There is no government fee, and the registration does not
The status on your IP India application page tells you where your trademark is in the Registry’s process and, more importantly, whether the clock is running on something you must do. Some statuses need nothing from you except patience. Others, such as Objected or Opposed, start short deadlines; missing them can lead to the application
A registered trademark in India lasts ten years, counted from the date of the application (because the registration is dated from that day). You can renew it for further ten-year periods without limit. The renewal application, Form TM-R, can be filed at any point in the last year before expiry. If you miss the expiry
The best time for a startup to protect its brand is before the brand goes public: once the name is chosen and cleared, and before the launch, the fundraise announcement or the first marketing spend. Indian law lets you apply for a mark you only propose to use, and a registration, once granted, counts from
A trademark in India is registered for specific goods or services, not for everything you might ever sell. Those goods and services are sorted into 45 classes: classes 1 to 34 cover goods, and classes 35 to 45 cover services. You choose the classes when you file, the official fee is charged per class, and
