Starting a New Business: The Set-Up Path

A Sequencing Checklist — Order Matters

Most new-business checklists are just a list. The order the items happen in matters as much as the items themselves — doing them out of sequence usually means redoing paperwork, missing a deadline tied to another step, or opening accounts you then have to unwind. This checklist is organized in the order that generally causes the fewest problems.

The Path

- 1. Decide your legal structure first (sole proprietorship, partnership, or incorporation). This decision affects almost everything that follows — how you register, what tax accounts you need, and how you open your bank account — so it has to come before the steps below, not alongside them.

- 2. Register your business name, if you're operating under anything other than your own legal name. Confirm the name isn't already in use in your jurisdiction before you print anything with it on it.

- 3. Obtain your business number and set up the tax accounts that apply to you (this may include a requirement to register once your revenue crosses a certain threshold — confirm the current rule for your situation rather than assuming it does or doesn't apply).

- 4. Open a dedicated business bank account — before your first transaction, not after. Keeping business and personal money separate from day one avoids a commingled-funds mess that is genuinely expensive and time-consuming to untangle later, and some registrations in step 3 may require this account to already exist.

- 5. Secure the licenses and permits specific to your sector and municipality. This varies enormously — a home-based consulting business and a food-service business face completely different requirements. Confirm locally; don't assume a generic checklist covers your specific case.

- 6. Set up a basic bookkeeping system before your first transaction, even if it's a simple spreadsheet to start. Trying to reconstruct a year of transactions from memory or scattered receipts at tax time is one of the most common and avoidable sources of new-business stress.

- 7. Arrange the insurance appropriate to your business type (general liability and, where relevant, professional liability). Many client contracts and some leases will require proof of this before you can even start working.

- 8. Set up a simple habit for keeping contracts and agreements — a single folder, physical or digital, from day one. It's much easier to build this habit before you have ten agreements to organize retroactively.

Why the Order Is the Point

Steps 3 and 4 in particular trip people up when done out of order — some tax account registrations expect a business bank account to already exist, and some banks expect your registration to already be complete. Working through this list in sequence, confirming the specific requirement at each step for your jurisdiction, avoids the back-and-forth that out-of-order set-up usually causes.

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