Incorporating
Your Business Online with Incorporator.com.au
by Neal
Macrossan
"Incorporator.com.au
is an
interesting resource I came across when hunting for advice on
structuring our business. So I asked Neal Macrossan to tell us
about it...." editor
Incorporator.com.au is a powerful
interactive, artificially intelligent computer program/website
for the creation of Australian Companies (any type or class).
It is incredibly simple to use, extremely convenient, highly
economical ($79.95 per usage – optionally payable at the
end, not the beginning) and accurate. It is also easy on the
eye and the brain - no ‘geek speak’ or unintelligible
error messages. It is available 24 hours a day / 7 days per
week. Help is only a phone call away – on a 1300 number –
for the price of a local call from anywhere in Australia.
Users answer a series of
questions, mostly by selecting from a range of pre-determined
optional answers. The ‘interview’ process is intelligent
in that users’ answers generally determine the next question
they are asked. In this way users are not bothered by any
questions that are not strictly applicable to their situation.
Guidance is available, via ‘pop-up windows’, to help users
appropriately answer any questions about which they are
unsure. Virtually all guidance is backed up by reference to
relevant sections of the Corporations Law (all
‘hyper-linked’ to the actual section wording of the
legislation).
On completion of the interview
process, users are able to pay, via a secure payments system (Telstra’s
‘Settlement Solutions’ system), for all the necessary
documents that Incorporator has, by that time, created for
them. These documents automatically download to the user’s
PC. They are of extremely high quality and are tailored taking
into account the user’s answers to its questions as well as
all the relevant provisions of the Corporations Law.
The user then prints out the
documents on the user’s own printer, signs or has them
signed as necessary, and posts or personally lodges the
application to incorporate with ASIC (clear and concise
instructions about these matters are included with the
print-outs). A Certificate of Incorporation is then issued to
the user directly by ASIC. The remaining documents are kept as
the company’s initial statutory records.
Test Drive the site
Potential users may test drive the
site at www.incorporator.com.au;
there is no need to pre-pay or register - users will only be
asked for a credit card number right near the end - and at
that stage users can pull out if you don't want to go any
further.
Price
The amount charged to users of the
site (but only if they elect to download and print out the
documents) is $79.95. This compares very favourably with the
charge made by orthodox shelf company providers – mostly in
the range of $160 to $280. (Also there is a government fee
payable to ASIC of $720. So the total cost using Incorporator,
including the government charge, would be $799.95 whereas a
common all-up cost with shelf company providers is around
$1000.00.)
Internal Checks
Incorporator has loads of internal
checks, and associated and informative error messages in order
to prevent users accidentally breaching various provisions of
the Corporations Law or otherwise making errors. (As a very
basic example, if the user enters a date of birth for a
proposed director indicating that the proposed director is
less than 18 years of age, the system will show a clear error
message indicating that a proposed director must be at least
18 years of age.)
Optional save and re-use inputs
feature
Users may choose to save their
inputs under a username and password of their choice and
re-access them at any time.
Advantages of saving inputs
1.
If a user’s session on Incorporator is accidentally
terminated, the user will be able to retrieve the information
they have inputted – they won't lose it all and have to
re-type it.
2.
Users can enter the information in stages. For example, users
might be half way through Incorporator and decide that they
want to complete their inputs later that day or on another day
- they will later be able to type in new inputs from where
they left off.
3.
User’s will be able to take advantage of information they
entered on a previous run which may also be applicable to
their formation of a future company - for example details of
the applicant and the lodging party or standard "shelf
company" structural patterns (e.g. 2 directors each
holding one ordinary fully paid share each). They won't have
to re-type them.
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