How to form a Limited (Ltd) company

The process starts by your first choosing what package you wish to order from us, entering your contact details incase we need to contact you with a query, and then entering the company details for the company you wish to form. Our website guides you through this process step-by-step.

You are then asked for the details for your officers of the company. This is basically anyone who is going to be a company director, a company secretary and a shareholder (owner) of the company. You need at least two people and our system wont let you proceed until you have entered two people.

When you have entered these officers details the next stage asks you for their "digital signature". This is the important part that sets electronic filing apart from the traditional paper filing. Instead of the old way of having to sign forms, with electronic filing you have to enter 3 personally identifiable pieces of information. An example is as follows; Question 1 asks "Please enter the first three letters of the name of the town in which you were born". If you were born in Leeds, then your answer would be "LEE", and so forth with the other questions. The final part of the process is where you have the opportunity to purchase any "optional extra's" that we have to offer. Once that selection is complete you are then ready to submit your application to Companies House. Our system uses a shopping cart process called Your Briefcase which is similar to a shopping basket found on many ecommerce websites. This means you can build up a collection of forms/orders before submitting them all to Companies House in one go. When you are ready to send your applications to Companies House simply click on your briefcase and select the forms you wish to submit. At this point you will be directed to our secure payment page with WorldPay.

For more detailed information on how to use our system you can download our PDF user manual from the New Users section of our website. This section becomes available once you have logged in to use our service or click on Home once you have started your order.

Important:
There is quite a common misconception about Certificates of Incorporation that are issued through electronic filing, one which even the larger banks have not got to grips with yet. Over 80% of all companies formed in the UK are done so using Electronic Filing and this percentage is growing. Companies House do not issue a hard copy certificate for companies that are formed using this method, and instead issue an encrypted PDF version of the certificate. This PDF document is the original certificate, but should you wish to have a hard copy Companies House issue guidelines on how these should be printed. They state that the PDF certificate must be printed on to 160gram Ivory card. This card can be purchased from most good stationery stores, and in fact we get ours from Staples.