How to incorporate in New Jersey
Incorporating your business in New Jersey can be done by hiring a lawyer, using an incorporation service, or by doing it yourself. If you hire a lawyer to incorporate your business in New Jersey, you will be paying hourly fees, plus any filing fees that are associated with incorporating your business. If you decide to hire an incorporation service, which they can often be found online, you will be paying a flat fee for their service, plus any filing fees that are needed to incorporate your company in New Jersey. Incorporating your business yourself means you will only be paying any filing fees that are need for the incorporation process.
Incorporating your business is not that hard; most people find that they can do it themselves. One of the easiest ways to go about incorporating your business is to use an operating agreement that your company already has drawn up. Using an old operating agreement makes filling out the required paperwork easy because majority of the information that is needed is included in the operating agreement.
Before you begin filling out any paperwork you will need to choose a name for your corporation. When choosing the name of your corporation you will need to perform a search of the name to ensure that it is not being used by any other registered businesses, you also have to look for any similar business names. You will also need to follow any other regulations that are required for corporation business names, such as having the proper ending and not using any terms that are not allowed. When creating a business name keep in mind the length of the name, the longer it is the more it might cost to get a corporate seal stamp made. Your corporate seal can be sued for issuing stock or even opening a bank account.
Once you have chosen your corporation’s name you will need to fill out the articles of incorporation. The articles of incorporation for the state of New Jersey do not need to include any director’s information, but you will want to keep it in your corporation’s records. The officers’ information does not need to be included in the articles of incorporation either, but needs to be kept on file in your corporations records. You will need to include any stock information in the articles of incorporation, including the class of stock that you will be issuing, how many shares of each class you will be issuing and the value of each share of stock. A good thing to know about issuing stock in New Jersey is that you can authorize an unlimited number of shares of No Par value stock, but the other classes of stock are limited.
Once the paperwork is done, you will need to file it with New Jersey’s filing office. When filing the articles of incorporation with the state’s filing office, you will need to pay the filing fee that is required. Once you have filed the first year you will be given a special date for your corporation to file its annual reports. Each year either 30 days before or 30 days after the date, you are given, your corporation will need to file its annual report and pay a $40 filing fee.
Once all your paperwork is filed, you will need to hold a meeting for your corporation so that you can adopt the corporation’s bylaws. You can also choose your board of directors and handle any other business that is required at the first meeting. Once that is done you will need to obtain your federal employer identification number and open a bank account for your corporation.
