Today I went to the Post Office to apply for a PO Box. The process is very straight forward and doesn’t take much time (unless you have to stand in line). You just fill out a form with some information about you and your company, such as who will have access to the box etc. You also specify the size of box you want. WireLoad won’t be receiving that much snail mail, so we settled for the smallest one.

When you’ve handed this form in, they’ll go a head and process the application and send you a mail to the address you specified in the application. According to the lady at the post office, this should only take a couple of days. When you receive that mail, you need to head back to the Post Office and that’s when you actually get your box (and find out the address). That’s also when you make the payment for the box.

What you need:
– 2 forms of real ID (credit card is not enough)
– This form (or you can fill it out there)

What you get:
– A size ‘1’ box (3″ by 5.5″)

What you pay:
– $20 for 6 months

UPDATE: As it turns out, the local Post Office only charge $20 / 6 months instead of $37 as announced on the homepage.

Note: This article only applies to California, and Santa Clara county. For other counties and states other rules may apply.

Two day ago we finally sent out our FBN-filing to the Clerk-Recorder’s office. The process of filing these papers was very straight forward. Go to the Clerk-Recorder’s homepage and download the PDF-file. The form is really intuitive, and won’t take you too much time to fill out. However, in order to file these paper you need an EIN. In addition to that information, you just basically fill out what the FBN is, where you’re located and names etc.

After this filing is done, you need to run a small advertisement in a magazine or newspaper (San Jose Business Journal is cheap) for 4 weeks to establish your FBN. When these weeks are over, the magazine will send you the ads, which you will archive with your business papers. The reason for this is that if someone later on will claim the name which you filed the FBN for, you have these ads as a proof of that you were the first one to use the name.

Why do you need an FBN? First of all this establishes you company name. In the case when you use a name other than your real business-name when conducting business, you need to have a FBN that links your FBN to your company. If you file a FBN for your real business name, you simply just establish your business-name further legally. In addition to that, whenever you want to file for another FBN, for let’s say a product or service, you don’t need to go through and file all the papers again. Then you just file an Addendum to add the product/service.

What you need:
– A registered company (LLC in our case)
– An EIN
– The form for filing FBN
– The form to file for additional FBN (optional)
– Two envelopes and two stamps (one for the filing and one for the self-addressed stamped envelope)

What you get:
– An FBN that’s valid for 5 years

What you pay:
– $37 for the initial filing
– $7 for each extra FBN (Addendum)

We’ve finally opened our bank account. Now we need an accounting system. Since we have little or no intention of doing any accounting ourselves, we need something that both our accountant and we can easily access.

Naturally, my first idea was to open a Quickbooks Online account. Looking at the costs; $9.95/month for the first 3 months, and then $19.95/month, it was reasonable. Everything online. Easily accessible for both me, Alex and our accountant. It can even communicate with our bank. I looked at some of their interactive demos, and it looks really good.

So why didn’t we sign up right away? Well, looking a bit closer, I discovered something unexpected. Quickbooks Online ONLY SUPPORTS WINDOWS 2000/XP WITH INTERNET EXPLORER. Seriously? What kind of web-developer creates an online service that is platform dependent? That defeats half the purpose of having the service web-based. Their recommendation for Mac/other users is to use Virtual PC or other Windows emulator. Are these guys for real?

To make it even more funny/sad, they do offer their ‘offline’ software for both Mac OS and Windows. So they can apparently write a Mac OS application, but cannot make their web service platform independent.

At this point I don’t know what system we’ll settle with. A web-based accounting system would be to prefer, but it needs to be platform independent (since Alex and I use Mac OS, and we don’t know what our accountant will be running). I’ve been looking at both Gnucash and TurboCASH, which are two Open Source applications, but neither of them are web-based or support multiple users.

The search goes on. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.

We were well prepared. We had every possible company paperwork neatly filed in a manila folder, three forms of personal identification each; our suit pants had perfect creases, our shirts crisp white. When we entered the bank, heads turned.

Either that or we were dressed pretty much like normal and didn’t have a single form except in digital format. And when we entered the bank we had to sit down and wait like everyone else. :)

Either way we have now taken our first ‘official’ action as a company, and WireLoad has opened a bank account. The idea is mostly that we want to pay things out of a company account instead of our personal accounts going forward.

Just to let you know: Washington Mutual, the bank of our choice, was not able to accept digitalized copies of company documents. The following things were needed, at least here in California and for Washington Mutual:

• Articles of Organization, with the ‘File’ stamp indicating it had been filed with the government.
• Statement of Information. In particular the bank needed to know who owned the company. There might be other ways to demonstrate this but a statement of information is probably the easiest way.
• An Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS.
• Two forms of identification for each person. Viktor previously had an account with Washington Mutual, so a single form of identification was sufficient there. I had to provide two pieces. This turned out to be easy: a primary id, my driver’s license, and a secondary id: a credit card with my name on it.
• A checkbook to make the initial deposit/pay fees.

All in all it wasn’t too bad. Apparently we can expect checks and a debit card to arrive within a few weeks. The terms for the account weren’t bad either. Free checks, free debit-cards, no minimum balance and no charges for deposits or withdrawals. That’s pretty much all we need at this point.

I just finished our EIN application. The application was fairly straight-forward, but we had to decide on a couple of things before before we could submit the application (such as fiscal year and if we wanted to file as a corporation or partnership).

You need an EIN to be able to hire people and to open a bank account.

Then you can fill out the application on IRS homepage.
I’d recommend that you read Understanding EIN before you apply.