A registration is treated as a box ticked at setup. Most of them start a recurring duty from the day they are granted, and the business only finds out when something is asked for.
Setting up a business involves obtaining a set of registrations. They get done, the certificates are filed somewhere, and everyone moves on to trading. It is treated as a one-time exercise, which is the mistake.
Most registrations are not a permission granted once. They are an enrolment into a regime, with periodic filings, records to maintain and details to keep current — starting from the date of grant, whether or not anyone noticed.
Three ways this surfaces
- A return was due and nobody knew
The registration was obtained for one purpose, and the recurring filing it created was never added to anyone's calendar. The first indication is a notice.
- The details no longer match the business
Address, activity, authorised signatory, additional places of business. Each change requires an amendment, and an out-of-date registration is a problem precisely when a counterparty asks to see it.
- Nobody can find the certificate
It exists in someone's email, or with a consultant who handled the setup. A customer's onboarding or a bank's checklist is a poor moment to discover this.
A registration you hold and do not maintain is worse than one you never obtained. It creates the duty without the discipline.
A register of what you hold
The remedy is unexciting and takes an afternoon: a single list of every registration, approval, permission and licence the business holds. For each one, five columns.
- What it is, and the number.
- Where the certificate is — an actual location, not a person.
- What ongoing obligations it creates: returns, records, displays, renewals.
- Who owns it by name, with a named alternate.
- The next date anything is due, and what triggers it.
The alternate matters more than it looks. Renewal windows have a habit of falling during someone's leave, and a single named owner is a single point of failure.
Do this at formation, not later
The cheapest time to build the register is while the registrations are being obtained, because the obligations are being read then anyway. Building it retrospectively means reconstructing what the business holds — which usually turns up at least one registration nobody remembered, and occasionally one that lapsed.
Which registrations apply
That depends on activity, turnover, headcount and the states you operate in, and it changes as the business grows. There is no universal list, and a business that obtained the right set at formation may need a different set two years later.
We do not publish thresholds or rates here — they change, and a stale figure published under an advisory firm's name is worse than none. The assessment is specific to the operation.