Pennsylvania Corporate Filing Tips
Frequently Asked Questions About Pennsylvania Business Filings
Welcome to PA! You can file everything online through the PA business portal. But it will take you awhile. If you are actually going to open up a Pennsylvania business soon, we highly recommend this because it basically notifies EVERY agency you could possibly think of in one shot. It will take you about an hour to get through the form though.
If you’re going to open up your business down the road, we highly DO NOT recommend doing your business filing online. Say you’re in the beginning stages of opening up your business like getting a website figured out, figuring out your pricing, your logo, mission statement, etc., and it may be a year or two before you hire employees, rent office space, and actually start pulling in money. If this is you or your expectations, registering your business through the online PA portal will probably make you discouraged enough to quit before you even get started. You’ll then get bombarded with all kinds of bureaucracy letters and reports that you’ll end up just filling out zeros on all the time.
If you do your Pennsylvania business filing by paper, MAKE SURE TO PUT A DOCKETING STATEMENT with your application. There are two parts to every business filing with the PA Corporations Bureau. One is the actual pdf template form to fill out. The second is the docketing statement that basically says the same crap you just got done saying on the first form. Hey, it’s Pennsylvania, you wouldn’t expect to just do something once and be done with it right?
The state forms for PA business filings are quite confusing for a lot of people. The state of PA does not allow you to use your own forms that might be written in English. They force you to use their forms and the super funny thing is that you have to cross out most of the articles on their forms. Yes, you read that correctly. They expect you to actually draw a line through certain parts of their forms that they make you use to cross out articles that don’t apply to you. You wonder how someone at the state actually made this up right?
So if you’re forming a Pennsylvania LLC, most people will have to draw a line through number 4, 5, and 7. Then you have to navigate through the docketing statement and check the type of company you are. If you were forming a domestic PA LLC, you would leave the right side of the docketing statement unchecked, and work your way through the rest of the fields that you just got done filling out on the previous LLC form. You then must mail these into the state. There’s no way to fax a Pennsylvania business filing or pay with a credit card. They only accept checks for payment.
The PA Secretary of State requires a Pennsylvania registered agent to be listed on the forms. Many of our clients hide their home address by listing us as the PA registered agent for their companies. As you’ll see on the forms, you only list our name as the registered agent, not our address. Your filing WILL get rejected if you list our address. On the tax return documents you would list your actual address or your home address so your tax returns go direct to you. The PA Dept. of Taxation does not show your address you list there publically. Using a PA registered agent like us keeps your business fairly private. There aren’t annual reports to be filed, and not very much information actually shows up on the PA Corporations Bureau website.
We’ve been doing Pennsylvania business filings for years. If you need to do a Pennsylvania business filing but don’t want the headache of dealing with the red tape and the PA Secretary of State, we can do the filing for you for $100 plus the state filing fees. You can sign up for our PA registered agent service and add the business filing service in your online account. We also have filing tips and all the forms you need in your online account, in case you want to do it yourself.