Singapore company registration, step by step

Singapore company registration usually means forming a private limited company (Pte Ltd) with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA). The first two decisions concern people and place: who takes the director seat that Singapore law reserves for someone ordinarily resident there, and which Singapore address serves as the registered office. Next comes the company name, which has to be reserved before the company can be registered, then the constitution and the registration itself. The corporate bank account comes last, on the bank's own review. Because the filing needs the reserved name, the resident director and the address, an open question about any of them holds up the filing and everything after it.

Once ACRA approves the registration, the company exists, and what follows is a routine rather than a project: accounts kept through the year, annual tax filing and a review of whether GST registration applies. The first practical step is the corporate bank account, and it is where earlier choices are tested, because the bank runs its own identity checks on the people who run and own the company and looks at how it was capitalised. The one thing worth doing at once is to put the company's financial year end, and the filing dates that follow from it, into a calendar that someone actually reads.