Business licence research & filing for US businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

No — business licence research & filing is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to IRS. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside registrations & licences more broadly, that stays with your CPA or enrolled agent, never with us.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for business licence research & filing — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Business licence research & filing sits inside registrations & licences, alongside EIN registration, State payroll registrations, Seller’s permit registration. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

No. Filing a city/county business licence application and a state seller's-permit application is unregulated administrative work — the kind of filing LegalZoom, Avalara and CorpNet do commercially with no CPA or attorney licence involved. What sits with your CPA is any determination of tax liability, nexus, or how much sales tax you owe and when.

A business licence, issued by your city or county, is the legal right to operate at a specific address — it has nothing to do with sales tax. A seller's permit, issued by your state's Department of Revenue, is what lets you collect sales tax on taxable sales. Most retail or product businesses need both; a service business with no taxable sales in that state may need only the licence, or neither, depending on the jurisdiction.

We map every city, county and state your business physically operates in or has economic nexus with against the licence and permit rules those jurisdictions currently publish, using your NAICS activity code to identify which requirements actually apply. Some jurisdictions have no local licence requirement at all — the map tells you what's real for your specific footprint, not a generic list.

It's the six-digit federal classification code for your business activity, and most city/county licence applications use it — not your own description of the business — to set the licence category and fee tier. We confirm the correct code against your actual activity before either application is filed, since the wrong code can put you in the wrong fee bracket.

Possibly, in every state where you've crossed that state's economic-nexus threshold (a sales-volume or transaction-count trigger set state by state since the 2018 Wayfair decision), even with zero physical presence there. We track your sales against published thresholds and flag states approaching or past them; whether registration is required in a specific state is a call for your CPA.

In most states, no — the permit itself stays active indefinitely. What does have deadlines is the sales-tax return the state assigns to it (monthly, quarterly or annual, based on your sales volume), and enough missed returns can get the permit revoked even though nothing about the business changed. We track the assigned cadence on the renewal calendar we hand over.

No. We register the seller's permit and hand you the active number and the filing cadence the state assigned to it. Calculating what's owed and filing the periodic sales-tax return is your CPA's work, or your own if you handle it directly.

It varies by jurisdiction — some cities issue a local licence instantly online, others take a few weeks and require an inspection first. State seller's permits typically range from same-day to about two weeks online. Because both depend on the specific city, county and state involved, we give you the actual expected timeline for your jurisdictions once the mapping is done, not a single number that applies everywhere.

Each physical location typically needs its own local business licence, and each state where you have nexus — physical or economic — needs its own seller's-permit registration if you sell taxable goods or services there. The jurisdiction map covers every address and nexus state you give us, and we rebuild it whenever a new one is added.

Some jurisdictions charge a penalty on top of the licence fee for having started operating before the licence was issued. We flag that risk as soon as the mapping surfaces it, so you can decide with your CPA or attorney how to handle any past-period exposure before we file the current application.

The jurisdiction map itself, the filed applications or active licence/permit numbers, a renewal calendar covering every local renewal cycle and every seller's-permit filing cadence, and copies of everything submitted — for your own records and for your CPA if a filing question comes up.