Registration process

Overview

Registering a company may, if you have not done it before, sound like a complex task that requires expensive expert help, but we would like to say that in most cases it is very simple. Our ambition with this article is to give you the needed information for being able to register a company. If you want to start a company yourself without doing so by buying a shelf-corporation, you can do so at Verksamt’s website. Most questions to consider have such pedagogical explanations that they can be resolved without any deeper professional knowledge or any expert help. If you start a company that you yourself will be 100% owner of, there are few mistakes you can make in the registration process that have any real practical consequences. If you start a company with several shareholders and board members, there may be reasons to get external help to establish articles of association and shareholder agreements, if it feels uncertain what applies and what different terms mean. You can read about frequently asked questions for the registration process here: Frequently Asked Questions Shelf-corporation or not? As we see it, shelf-corporations had a much larger role previously when it was more complex and time-consuming to start a company. Nowadays, it is very easy to register a limited company on www.verksamt.se, so the shelf-corporations do not have quite as much value anymore. However, there are still some benefits of shelf-corporations to consider:

1. It is much faster to start a business. If it is urgent and you would like to have had a company already yesterday, shelf-corporations are definitely a good alternative. It can save you a couple of weeks before everything is up and running. A bit more lately as the banks have raised the requirements for customer knowledge and the process of starting company accounts has been greatly extended. For this reason it is nowadays the process of opening a bank account that takes time, and not to register the company.
2. Acquiring a shelf-corporation that already has a bank account can be a great advantage for people who for various reasons may have difficulty opening a bank account in a start-up company. For example, people with payment remarks. Most shelf-corporations don’t have a bank account, and those who do costs a lot more money.
3. There may be benefits to credit ratings and for public procurement that require a company history. If you buy a shelf-corporation that has had previous operations without remarks, the credit rating will be better than in a newly started company, and some public procurements may require that there is a history of the company. This is not relevant for all start-ups, but it may be for some.

If these benefits are important to you, it may be a good idea to buy a shelf-corporation when you start your business. If not, it is probably not worth the extra cost compared to registering the company yourself.