Hi there,
Hope you had a great weekend. It’s a
start of a new week and we will be sharing how you can help take your Business
to the next level by getting your Business registered with Corporate Affairs
Commission (CAC).
Proper registration is one of the
important things many small business owners neglect to their detriment. This is
because a good number of them think it’s not important and some others who
think it’s important assume it will be a very difficult task.
Why
bother registering with CAC?
The importance of registering a
business can never be over-emphasized.
• For one, when it
comes to doing serious business, many agencies will never take you serious if
your company is not registered.
• Secondly, you might have to
discover that people and that includes you and I, feel more comfortable paying
for services and products into a corporate account with the name of an
organisation than paying into Individual account.You may have missed an
important sale because when your prospect made up his mind to buy, the account
number you sent him was an individual account in your name.He thought it too
risky because it was a sizable amount involved.
People feel if the
account is in a corporate name, the organization can be traced if the
transaction went foul. If you register your company, you can use the documents
to open a corporate account with less stress.
• Moreover, if you have a business
idea and you go ahead and register the business name, even if you spend 2 years
perfecting the plan and raising the capital, for it, those 2 years from when
the business was registered can count for you as years of experience.
In this post, you’ll be learning
simple steps you can take to register your business name with the corporate
affairs commission in less than 21 days.
A
little about CAC:
The Corporate Affairs Commission
(CAC) was established by the Companies and Allied matters act, which was
promulgated in 1990 to regulate the formation and management of companies in
Nigeria. The CAC is in charge of registering businesses in Nigeria. They have
offices all over Nigeria and in the concluding part of this post, you’ll see
the addresses of their offices in different locations in Nigeria, so finding
the one nearest to you should be very simple.
Registering
a Business name
If you want to register a business
name, you can do it in 2 ways.
• One is to engage the services of a
lawyer and he will get it done for you with about N10,000. The trouble is that
the next time you want to register another business name, you will have to pay
him another N10,000
If you are a serial entrepreneur with
many business ideas flowing in you, you will be spending too much money for
this when you can actually spend less by understanding the information I am
going to share with you here.
• The second
way to get your business name registered is to do
it yourself. Yes, you can walk into any branch of the corporate affairs commission
and you will get your business registered.
The trouble with
this is that if you do not know the secrets of
going about it, you will spend months trying to get your business name
registered. A friend of mine spent over 6 months trying to register his
business name because he worked through an agent who really wasted his time and
messed him up real bad. For the sake of clarity, This guide shows the process
of how to get your business name registered and not a limited liability company
or an NGO.
Getting
started:
Once you are ready to register your
business name with the corporate affairs commission, the first thing you should
do is to go to their office nearest to you.
• Walk in to the
nearest branch to you and ask
for name reservation form. It costs just Five Hundred Naira
only. You will be given a receipt and a form. On the form, you will be asked to
fill in a few details. Details like…
• Your
Name
• Your
Address
• Your
Desired Business Names
• A
Space To Fill The Type Of Business You Want to Register
(Choose
Enterprises/Business Name)
You will be required to choose two
business names. The reason is that if one is not available, they can reserve
the other for you. If none of them is available, you will need to do it all
over again. You will have to pay the N500 again and you will have to wait for
the result.
How
long does it take to reserve a name with CAC?
Sadly in this our dotcom age, when
you ask for a name reservation, it takes about 2 weeks before the results are
returned. It is sometimes as fast as one week or 10 days but it generally takes
2 weeks. Now imagine if your chosen business name is not available, you have to
go through that 2 week process again. If the new one is not available as well,
you have to go over the process… again… and… again. That is why it takes people
a long time to sort out.
So
How Will You Prevent That From Happening To You?
Good question! What you need to do is
to choose a name no one else would have chosen. Now, you have to be creative
and ingenious about it. If you choose just any name, I can assure you someone
has registered it.
Don’t even think about registering names like
these…
• Obyno
Enterprises
• Prosperity
Ventures
• Good
Hope Enterprises
• Adamu
Hassan Ventures
• Wealth
Resources Consulting
If you choose names
like these, then there is a high probability that they have already been taken
by someone else and as an entrepreneur, you don’t have time to waste experimenting
on new names at every 2 week interval.Having sorted out the name issue and
having submitted your form, you will have to wait till the result comes out.
There is nothing you can do about that. You just have to wait. All I’ll advise
you to do is to get ready so when the results come out, you will be prepared to
register immediately.
What
you need
Prepare
_ 2 passport photographs
_ Stapler (believe it or not, some CAC branches do
not have)
_ The details of a partner (you cannot register
alone, add someone…
anyone)
_ The partner’s photographs.
_ Your address (you can use your home address)
_ Telephone number (use GSM)
_ Local government area and a few other
requirements.
Why
be prepared ahead of time?
Majority of upstart entrepreneurs
will fold their hands while the 2 weeks passes but I advise you to work while
you wait. Start gathering the materials you need one by one. Why? You see, your
name reservation is just for a number of days, you have to register properly
before the grace period expires and someone else can take up that name. We want
to get your business name registered in record time so we want to move faster
than normal. When name reservation results come out, what people normally do is
to start studying the new documents they are provided with to fill.If you
prepare early, you will get your registration done once the results are out.
According to the CAC Website, Fees for some
services include:
Registration of Business Name =N=10,000.00
Change of Name =N=2,000.00
Business Name Search =N=500.00.
Change of Partnership =N=1,000.00
Change of Address =N=1,000.00
Certified True Copy of a Business Name Certificate
=N=1,000.00
Filing of Annual returns =N=300.00
Business Name Registration Form =N=250.00
In the concluding part of this post, you will
learn about:
·
Objects allowed by CAC
·
CAC offices in Nigeria
Visit CAC
Website (www.cac.gov.ng)
for more details, this serves as a guide as shared by Edwin Ndubisi.
- SOURCE: Spread Media NG
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