For those of you who have registered your business as an LLC, what actions/forums/licenses did you have to obtain from federal/state/county/city levels? I'm talking EIN, DBA, AoC, taxes etc. (US obviously)
There are two ways to register your LLC, by yourself, or using one of the cheap online companies. This is one of the areas that with a little research you can do yourself. If you don't want to do it yourself, you can find a company to do it for as little as $99 (plus the filing fee.) Be careful not to order unneeded upgrades. To register your LLC by yourself, go to the Secretary of State site of the state in which you wish to register. They will have a search feature to see if the name is available. If the name you want is available, there will be a form at the site for registering your LLC, and payng your filing fee for that state. You will need an EIN number to open a bank account. You can get your EIN for free from the IRS at this site: https://sa1.www4.irs.gov/modiein/individual/index.jsp Depending on what your site provides, you will need a sales tax number. This is sometimes done at the State level, and sometimes at the local level. Finally, you will need to create the operating agreement for your LLC. This does not need to be filed with the State, but it becomes the rules under which your LLC is managed by you. The better your operating agreement the less chance for problems down the road.
I agree with Andrew. Particularly if you have a single member LLC (that is, you are the only owner) forming an LLC yourself is very simple. Almost every state offers online filing, though some (Illinois, for example) charge an extra fee for filing the articles of organization online. For a single member LLC, it is really hard to go wrong filing your own articles of organization directly with the secretary of state or its equivalent. It is also easy in most states to file organization documents for an LLC which has two or more members. In a few states, there are critical decisions that need to be made, however. You may need answers that are not clear to either you or an online filing service (which cannot give legal advice in connection with the formation). For example, an Illinois LLC must be designated as either member-managed or manager-managed at the time of formation. Making the wrong choice for your LLC can have serious consequences later. In those cases, you would be well advised to get advice from a business attorney. In most cases, using an attorney to prepare and file the organizational documents, and provide legal advice with respect to the filing, is not that much money, often just a couple of hundred dollars. It is fine to save that money when the filing is straight-forward for a one-man operation, but probably penny-wise and pound foolish when you are starting an LLC with multiple members. The same goes for the operating agreement. In a single member LLC, the operating agreement (if there even is one) is a simple form. When you have more than one member, you should be considering a lot of issues relating to the operation and management of the LLC, the allocations of profits and losses, the distribution of cash and the sale or transfer a member's interest in the LLC. Again, cutting corners to save a little money up front can be extraordinarily expensive down the road.