What you need ready before you register a company

The company registration form itself is quick. What slows people down is stopping halfway to chase an address, a director ID or a decision about shares, so have everything on the desk before you start.

Start with the people. A proprietary company needs at least one director, aged 18 or over, and at least one director must ordinarily live in Australia. If you are setting up on your own and you live here, that is already covered.

Each director also needs a director ID before they can be appointed. It is a unique number that stays with a person for life, no matter how many companies they sit on, so if you already have one from another company you use the same number. If you do not have one yet, sort it out early, because identity checks can hold it up.

Then the owners. The company needs at least one shareholder (ASIC calls them members), and the shareholder can be the same person as the director. Most one-person companies are set up exactly that way.

The details to have in front of you

1. A company name you would like, ending in "Pty Ltd" or "Proprietary Limited". You can also go without a name and use the company's ACN instead.
2. A registered office. This has to be a street address in Australia, never a PO box, because it is where official letters go. If you do not occupy the premises yourself (your accountant's office, say), you need the occupier's written consent to use the address.
3. A principal place of business, meaning where the company will mainly operate. It can be the same as the registered office.
4. Full names and addresses for every director and shareholder, plus date and place of birth for each director.
5. The director ID for each director.
6. A share structure. Small companies usually keep this simple, for example 100 ordinary shares all held by the founder.

A company can adopt its own constitution, but it does not have to. Plenty of small companies rely on the replaceable rules in the Corporations Act, which cover the basics such as how directors are appointed and how meetings run. If you have several shareholders or plan to bring in investors, a tailored constitution is a sensible conversation to have with a lawyer or accountant. This is general information only, and an adviser can tell you which approach suits your situation.

How it works with us

We register proprietary companies limited by shares. On our company registration page you start by checking the name. A name can be knocked back if it is identical to an existing one or contains restricted words, so this is where you find out, before anything is lodged.

Once the name is clear, the form asks for the people and the places: each director and their director ID, each shareholder and their shares, and the registered office. Then you pay, and we lodge the registration with ASIC.

When ASIC registers the company you get its Australian Company Number, or ACN. Keep the registration paperwork somewhere safe, because banks and others sometimes ask to see it.

An ACN is not an ABN. If the company is going to trade it needs an Australian Business Number too, and you can add the ABN application to the same order instead of coming back for it later.

If you would rather not use a home address as the registered office, our optional Premium Registered Office add-on gives the company a Sydney CBD address, and mail that arrives there is scanned for you.

The company then has a yearly review with ASIC, with a fee that has a time limit to pay. We handle that too. When the review comes around you search for the company on our company review page and pay, we pay the ASIC review fee for you, and we email a solvency resolution document for the directors to sign. The contact email on the company's record decides whether the notice reaches you, so point it at an inbox someone reads.

If a question on the form has you stuck, our support team is on 1300 070 000, Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm Melbourne time.