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Part of State filing guides: the skeleton every state shares, and where they differ
What a paid filing service still cannot decide for your business
How to judge a business filing service against what your state office already does for free, including which judgments no service will ever make for you.
There is an entire industry between you and your state's filing office, and most of it is selling convenience rather than knowledge. That is a legitimate thing to sell. The difficulty is that the marketing usually implies knowledge, and knowledge is the part you actually need.
This page is a way of working out which you are being offered, and what to check before handing anything over for an LLC, a corporation or another entity.
What to take away
- Your state's filing officethe Secretary of State or the Division of Corporations, depending on the state — publishes its instructions and takes filings directly. Anything else is somebody else's service, priced by them.
- Check the address bar before you check anything else. Lookalike sites compete for exactly the searches you are running.
- A service cannot make an office faster. Any speed claim is about its own queue.
- The judgments a service will not make for you are the ones that matter: which legal form — an LLC, a corporation or an S corporation election — what ownership split, what management structure, and whether you need insurance rather than an entity.
Start at the office
Reach your state's filing office — the Secretary of State or the Division of Corporations, whichever your state uses — through a route you trust, starting with these state filing guides. The IRS keeps a directory of state government sites that is a reliable way in, and the office's own instructions are the only current and authoritative description of what it wants. Read them before evaluating anything else, because everything below assumes you know what the baseline is.
The SBA's general overview of registering a business is a fair map of the process across states, and it is a useful sanity check against any service's description of what is involved.
What a service actually does
What it means
- "We file for you"
- Submitting a form you could submit
- "Fast filing"
- Their queue, not the office's
- Name check included
- A search of one register
- Registered agent included
- A real service, often at an introductory rate
- Operating agreement or bylaws template
- A document you still have to understand
- Federal identifier obtained
- An application that is free to make
- Compliance alerts
- Reminders
What to ask
- "We file for you"
- What is the fee, itemized, separate from the state's own charge?
- "Fast filing"
- Does anything you do change the office's own timing?
- Name check included
- Which register, and does it cover rights in trade?
- Registered agent included
- What does year two cost, and does it renew automatically?
- Operating agreement or bylaws template
- Who reviews it, and is that person a lawyer?
- Federal identifier obtained
- Why is there a charge, and what is it for?
- Compliance alerts
- Whose obligation is it if the reminder does not arrive?
The federal identifier row is worth singling out. The IRS issues it at no charge and nobody else issues one, which is set out on its own employer identification number page. Any fee attached to it is somebody's service fee, and the same reasoning is worked through in the identifier explained.
The services you will actually see
The names doing this at scale are consumer brands — LegalZoom, ZenBusiness and Northwest Registered Agent among them — and they sell the same three things: a filing you could make yourself, a registered agent to receive legal papers, and reminders about recurring filings. Each publishes its own prices, and those prices move; the state's own filing fee is set by the office and passes through to it, never to the service.
Watch the registered agent line in particular. Many packages include the first year of registered agent service and bill the renewal separately, so ask for the year-two price before you sign.
Filing service claims vs. reality
What is offered
- We file for you
- Submitting a form you could submit
- Fast filing
- Their queue, not the office's
- Name check included
- A search of one register
- Registered agent included
- Real service, often introductory rate
- Operating agreement template
- A document you still have to understand
- Federal identifier obtained
- An application that is free to make
- Compliance alerts
- Reminders
What it means
- We file for you
- Fast filing
- Name check included
- Registered agent included
- Operating agreement template
- Federal identifier obtained
- Compliance alerts
What no service decides
Which legal form suits you — an LLC, a corporation, or an LLC that elects S corporation treatment on IRS Form 2553 — how ownership is split, what the management structure should be, and whether your exposures need insurance rather than an entity. Those are judgments for a lawyer and an accountant with your facts, from the comparison in choosing a form.
Most services say so in their own terms. The marketing rarely does, and the gap between the two is where people end up with a structure nobody chose.
Checking a site before you use it
Look at the address bar. A state agency's page sits on a state government domain, usually one ending in .gov, and design tells you nothing. Sites built to be mistaken for an office are usually well made, because they are competing for people who have already decided to act.
Then ask what happens to your information, since a filing involves identifying details about real people. And ask who receives correspondence from the office afterwards, because you want that to be you.
After you file, whoever filed it
- Read your own entry in the state's business registry rather than trusting a confirmation email.
- Get the accepted document itself, not a portal view of it.
- Check the entity name character by character against what you intended.
- Confirm who is named as the registered agent for legal papers, and that they know, which is the role described in what the agent does.
- Calendar the recurring report yourselfthe annual report, or the statement of information in the states that use that name — whatever reminders you have been promised.
That last point is the one worth insisting on. State law puts the registered agent and the recurring report on the entity, not on whoever filed for it, so the obligation stays yours regardless of who presses the button. The wider list of things that have to stay true is in what to keep current.
After you file: verify these
- Read your own entry in the state registry
- Get the accepted document itself
- Check entity name character by character
- Confirm who is named as legal contact
- Calendar the recurring report yourself
Common questions
Is using a service a mistake?
No. Paying for an errand is normal. The mistake is believing the fee bought a decision, or that it transferred a duty.
Are the bundled packages good value?
Sometimes, and they are hard to compare because the components are not itemized. Ask for the itemized prices and the renewal prices, and the comparison becomes possible.
Can a service tell me which form to choose?
Most are not licensed to, and their own terms usually say so. Treat any answer they give as marketing.
What if the filing is rejected?
Ask who handles resubmission and who pays. It is a cheap question before signing and an annoying one afterwards.
What is the single best habit?
Start at the office's own site, every time, for every state process. It is the habit that protects you across all of them.
