Plain-English guides to registering, running and staying compliant as a business in India.
For most first-time founders the choice comes down to how much structure you want in return for how much credibility. A public charitable trust is the quickest to set up and is run by a small group of trustees. A society is a membership body with an elected governing body. A Section 8 company is
A Section 8 company is a full company in the eyes of the Companies Act, 2013. It does not get a holiday from ROC filings because it is a charity: it holds an AGM, gets its accounts audited, and files financial statements and an annual return with MCA every year. What it does get is
A company’s registered office can be almost any real address where the company can actually receive letters and notices: a rented office, a shop, a factory, your own home, or a desk in a coworking space. What the MCA cares about is not the type of premises but the paperwork behind it and whether official
Stay a sole proprietor while the business is small, low-risk and funded by you. Incorporate a private limited company when any one of these becomes true: you want a co-founder or investor to own part of it, the business is taking on debts or contracts big enough to threaten your personal assets, or the customers
If you want limited liability for a new Indian business, you will almost always end up choosing between three structures: a private limited company, a limited liability partnership (LLP) and a One Person Company (OPC). All three are registered with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), all three keep your personal assets separate from the
Provident fund (PF) becomes compulsory when an establishment employs 20 or more people. Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) becomes compulsory at 10 or more. Within a covered establishment, PF is mandatory for employees earning up to ₹15,000 a month in basic wages and dearness allowance. ESI covers employees earning up to ₹21,000 a month in gross
A partnership deed should settle, in writing, the things partners most often fall out over: how profit is split, what each person puts in and takes out, who can sign for the firm, how decisions are made, and what happens when someone wants to leave, joins, dies or is pushed out. Where the deed says
Starting an NGO in India is a sequence, not a single registration. You form the organisation under one of three laws, give it a PAN and a bank account, then register it with the income tax department so its income is exempt and its donors can claim a deduction. Only after that do the funding-specific
NGO Darpan is a free online register of voluntary organisations run by NITI Aayog, with the software built by the National Informatics Centre. When an NGO signs up and its details are accepted, the portal generates a unique ID for it. That ID is how several government systems recognise the organisation: grant applications to central
MSME-1 is a half-yearly return in which a company tells the Registrar how much it owes to micro and small suppliers beyond 45 days, and why. It is due by 30 April (for October to March) and 31 October (for April to September), and only companies that actually have such overdue dues need to file.
