Set Up the Business: Entity, Contracts, Invoicing, Insurance
The commercial and legal groundwork to have in place before your first invoice, not after your first dispute.
Do this before the first invoice
Founders postpone the administrative setup until a customer forces it, which means it gets done badly, in a hurry, during the week they should be delivering. The whole list below takes a few days and removes a category of problem you do not want during your first paid engagement.
You also cannot sell to a serious buyer without it. Procurement will ask for an entity, an insurance certificate, and a signed agreement before money moves, and discovering that mid-deal costs you weeks at exactly the wrong moment.
Take specific advice for your own jurisdiction. The categories below are universal; the forms, thresholds, and names are not, and an hour with a local accountant early is cheaper than restructuring later.
Entity and banking
Form a limited company rather than trading personally. The point is liability separation: agent work touches customer data and takes actions with commercial consequences, and you do not want a mistake reaching your personal assets. It also reads as more credible in procurement.
Open a business bank account on day one and never mix it with personal spending. This is not bookkeeping fussiness. Mixed accounts are how the liability separation you just paid for gets undone, and untangling a year of mixed transactions is genuinely miserable.
Register for tax where you are required to, and find out early whether your revenue will cross a registration threshold, because crossing one unknowingly is an expensive surprise. If you will sell across borders, ask specifically how that changes your obligations before the first international invoice, not after.
4 more sections in this article
- The three documents you need
- Invoicing and actually getting paid
- Insurance and liability for agent work
- Records you will wish you had kept
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Published 14 August 2026. Last reviewed 17 August 2026. We re-read this library on a schedule and date every article, so you can see for yourself how current it is.