As a prospective business owner or entrepreneur in Texas, you may be wondering how to start your business. Every business requires organization and a clear understanding of the need to maintain and keep documents. Palmer Lehman Sandberg, PLLC, can provide a clear breakdown of the types of documents that every business will begin to create. We offer a complimentary consultation to assess your liability protection and organization of all documents.
First, we’ll take a look at the different types of businesses that you can register as. Each one serves a unique purpose and can benefit business owners in different ways. Some of them are:
- Sole proprietorship
- Limited liability companies and professional limited liability companies
- Limited partnerships
- Corporations
- Professional associations
In order to determine which one will suit you the best, you will need to ask yourself a few questions. For example, how big do you intend your business to be? Do you envision franchises in the future? How many employees will you have, if any at all? Do you intend to stay local, regional or national? Do you have plans to go international?
In addition to planning far into the future for your size, you will also want to look at your legal needs. Will you be working with a lot of contracts? Will you hire independent contractors? Will you be working with other businesses or partners?
One Example for a medium sized cleaning company is below.
This business has formed an LLC with two partners. They must keep a record of their formation documents, signed Operating Agreement, Federal Employment Identification Number (EIN), annual Texas franchise tax returns, and federal tax returns (1065 Partnership Return).
Clients/Customers
Every client should have a written agreement which governs the scope of services provided, payment terms and who is responsible for communication. This invoice form or contract should be readily available and frequently updated to reflect concerns or ambiguity in this document. Who is responsible for damage? Who provides cleaning supplies? What are the cancellation terms?
Employees/Contractors
When your work load exceeds what the owner can perform themselves, businesses hire employees or contractors to delegate tasks to. Having an accurate and detailed compensation agreement will avoid disagreements about clear job description duties as well as the terms and conditions for payments, bonuses or overtime. Employees may do customer service while contractors perform on site job cleaning.
Business Contracts
As you continue to grow, your business will have an opportunity to interact with other businesses. These business to business contracts could be a contract covering advertising on a website. How many posts? What is the fee? What happens if the website is down? These are common questions that should be agreed upon beforehand in a written agreement.
No matter where you are in the creation of your business, your business could benefit from the experienced guidance of a legal professional. Consider taking a look at our page on the formation of businesses, linked here, if you want to learn more.
