Filing a DBA

November 2, 2006 11:24 PM

Anyone have any experience with filing DBAs on-line? And can point me to a good (and preferably cheap) site?

Need to register a company name and all that jazz...accountant said I could find some places that do it on-line. Just wanna know if anyone has successfully done it and what site they used.

thanks!

posted by ryecatcher to work & money (3 comments total)

Try your state government website, they should have everything you need there. You may need to file in your city or county too.
posted by b1tr0t at 12:43 AM on November 3, 2006

You could try Legalzoom. I haven't actually completed one yet but I started the process and it seems to cover a lot of bases. It saves your info in case you need to go collect information mid-file. Someone reviews your form, they send it for your signature, you send it back and the file it for you. Lots of states have a requirement that you have to publish your new name in your local paper's classifieds, and they take care of that too.

Cost varies by state but probably is just a few hundred dollars. As a bonus, if you start an application and don't finish, they'll send you some "please come back and spend money!" emails with coupons for $10-15 off. :)

It is much cheaper to just go to your local county clerk and file everything yourself, but paying for one less headache and knowing you'll fill out everything correctly is worth it, in my opinion.

(Where I live, you file a DBA with the county, and despite being in a booming university town the web was not helpful. I had to write my clerk for information that could easily be published on the web, and for some reason just wasn't.)
posted by Famous at 4:19 AM on November 3, 2006

The question was not about setting up a corporation, but rather (as I understood it) registered an assumed name for purposes of operating an individual business.

This varies state by state, but the process is similar in most, I think. In my state, this can be done at the county level or at the state level. You can go to the county clerk's office and fill out a form. Or you can go to your state's web site (look for "corporate registration", often under the Secretary of State office) and find the form for registering a name as an assumed name.

The purpose in either case is to have a public registration that tells anyone who needs to know that Acme Enterprises is really John Smith doing business under that name.
posted by yclipse at 5:27 AM on November 3, 2006