The First 180 Days After Incorporation: A Founder Checklist

The certificate of incorporation arrives and most founders assume the admin is done. It is not. There are eight things to handle in the first six months, and one of them carries a ₹50,000 penalty on the company plus ₹1,000 a day on every director.

Day 1 to 30: appoint your first auditor

Deadline: 30 days from incorporation. The board must appoint the first statutory auditor within 30 days of incorporation. If the board does not, the members must, within 90 days at an extraordinary general meeting.

This is the earliest deadline and the most commonly missed, because founders assume an auditor is something you need at year end. You need one appointed now. Statutory audit is mandatory for every company regardless of turnover, including an OPC with nil revenue. There is no small-company exemption from audit.

Day 1 to 30: open the bank account

Not a statutory deadline, but everything else depends on it. You need it before the next item, because the next item requires proof that shareholders actually paid for their shares.

Whenever the money moves: get the subscription money in properly

Every shareholder must pay for the shares they subscribed to in the MOA, from their own bank account, in an amount matching their shareholding.

This is worth stating plainly because it is the single most common reason INC-20A filings fail:

• One founder transferring the total for both shareholders does not work
• Money routed through a third party does not work
• A round figure that does not tie to the shareholding split does not work
• Cash does not work

Day 1 to 180: file INC-20A

Deadline: 180 days from incorporation. This is the expensive one.

Form INC-20A is the declaration for commencement of business under Section 10A. A director declares that every subscriber has paid the value of their shares, supported by the bank statement. Until it is filed, your company cannot legally commence business and cannot exercise any borrowing powers.

The Registrar may also move to strike the company off under Section 248, on the reasonable ground that it is not carrying on business.

In practice your bank will open an account on the certificate of incorporation and you will probably start trading immediately. That does not make it lawful, and it becomes a disclosed non-compliance the first time an investor or acquirer reads your file.

Within 15 days of the AGM: file ADT-1

ADT-1 records the auditor appointment with the Registrar. It follows the AGM, but the underlying appointment is the 30-day item above.

As applicable: registrations

None of these have a single fixed deadline, but they gate your ability to operate.

• GST, where you cross the threshold or are required to register regardless, including inter-state supply and e-commerce sales
• Professional tax, PTEC and PTRC, state-dependent
• Shop and Establishment, state-dependent, commonly within 30 days of commencing business
• Trade licence, municipal, where your premises and trade need one
• EPFO and ESIC, which SPICe+ registers you for at incorporation but which activate on crossing employee thresholds
• Udyam registration, which is free, takes a day, and gets you a 50 per cent discount on trademark filing fees among other things

Early: file the trademark

Not statutory, but the cheapest it will ever be. Register the name as a wordmark first. It protects the word in every font and survives every rebrand, which a logo registration does not. With Udyam or DPIIT recognition, the government fee is ₹4,500 per class instead of ₹9,000.

Filing early also fixes your priority date, which matters if anyone else is thinking about the same name.

Before year end: the annual cycle starts

Plus four board meetings a year with no gap exceeding 120 days (a small company or OPC needs only one in each half of the calendar year, at least 90 days apart), and the statutory registers under Section 88, which nobody maintains and every diligence team asks for.

An OPC works differently. No AGM, AOC-4 due 180 days after year end rather than 30 days after an AGM, and MGT-7A instead of MGT-7.

The checklist

The one that actually costs money

If you take one thing from this: INC-20A, 180 days.

Everything else on this list is either cheap to fix late or has no penalty attached. That one carries ₹50,000 on the company, ₹1,000 a day on each director, and strike-off exposure, and the deadline runs from your incorporation date whether or not anyone has told you about it. Put it in a calendar today.