Building a Business

How to Incorporate: Easy Steps to Creating a Corporation

Joe Collins, CPA, CA
/
March 14, 2023

Affiliate disclosure

Here are a couple ways to incorporate your business, both with advantages and disadvantages. Read on to learn how to get’r done.

Here are a couple of ways to incorporate your business, both with advantages and disadvantages. Take 3 minutes to read this short article and learn how.

Option 1: DIY

You can use a service like Ownr (20% off using our affiliate link) to incorporate your business.

Or go straight to the source and incorporate yourself in BC via the BC corporate registry services, here.

For this article we will assume you need some hand-holding and will use a service. Ownr is online service that takes you down a garden path to incorporate your business.

Advantages:

  • The form to fill out is really straightforward
  • The fee is pretty darn cheap
  • You can add a minute book to keep the cost of keeping your corporate records low
  • The process takes about 10 minutes
  • The process is about as easy as it gets for incorporation

Disadvantages:

  • The information is generic in nature and may not apply specifically to your situation
  • You may still need to consult with your accountant before incorporating to make sure that you set things up properly for tax planning purposes

Overall, this is a great option if you want to incorporate at a low cost and you have a simple share structure.

Option 2: Hire a Professional

In this case, your professional is a lawyer. Fun Party Fact*: Chartered Professional Accountants are prohibited from incorporating companies for their clients.

Advantages:

  • A lawyer will ask you questions regarding your specific situation and adapt your incorporation to fit
  • A lawyer will often consult an accountant on the best share structure for tax planning purposes
  • You can have peace of mind that the incorporation was done correctly

Disadvantages:

  • It costs more: in addition to any filing fees, you are likely looking at $1000 and up for the lawyer's time

Hiring a lawyer is a good call if you have a more complicated share structure in mind. This can also be a really good option if you are the type of person who needs to talk through your situation and have someone else take care of the details.

Summary

What option should you choose? How long is a piece of string? It depends!

You will need to factor in whether you are the type of person that wants some professional reflection to avoid pitfalls or are happy to do some of your own research. You should also consider the complexity of your ownership structure. As with most things in business, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Not sure whether you should even incorporate in the first place, check out our article on that very topic.

*Disclaimer: "Fun Party Facts" are not actually fun party facts.



Work With Avalon

Our goal is to help small businesses thrive, and we want to help as many businesses as we can.

Here are a few ways that we can help ⬇️

🤝Hire Avalon
We offer full-service bookkeeping and accounting services for small businesses in Canada.

We start by helping incorporated businesses navigate the maze that is tax compliance in Canada. We provide clarity on your business' financial performance so you can make informed decisions with the guidance of our expert team.

If you're interested in hiring Avalon, check out our Services Page or get an idea of the Service Packages that we offer.

🏫Learn New Skills
For those wanting to learn the skills needed take on your own bookkeeping and accounting, we offer online courses.

We've taken our years of experience working with hundreds of small business owners and distilled them down into practical online lessons.

Check out our Business Courses page to take your skills to the next level.

📖Share Our Knowledge
We know that being a small business owner is challenging.  There are so many hurdles to overcome and questions to answer when running a business.

We aim to help as many business owners as possible to overcome those hurdles and answer those questions by sharing our knowledge.

Check out our Blog, YouTube Channel and Downloadable Guides that have helped thousands of people get answers to their questions.  

You can also sign up to our Weekly Newsletter to get tips from Joe on building a successful business.

We speak in plain language and put out the most useful content that we can.

Thanks for reading!
Article by
Joe Collins, CPA, CA
.
Originally published
March 14, 2023
.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing!

Let's Get Started

Use the form below and we'll respond within two business days

How can we help?
Is your business incorporated?
What's your  annual revenue?
$0
Tell us about the services you require or advice you need

Want to hear more business tips?

Sign up to our newsletter to get tax and business tips from Joe as well as his expert insight into running a successful business.