Requirements for registering your business under sole-proprietorship:
- Certificate of Business Name Registration from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) [READ: Registering a business name]
- Barangay/Municipality/Regional clearance (depending on the scale and scope of the intended operations)
- Business permit from mayor’s office
- Business Tax Identification Number (TIN)
Why Register?
Registering a business is the best thing that you can do for yourself and your country. This gives you more breadth because your business would now be more or less more legal. Legal here means that you would already be filing for and pay your taxes, paying your business permits, paying your employees based on minimum wage laws and you would now be able to write an official receipt when your clients ask for it.
When you register your business you give your efforts a chance to grow. Registering a business, however, is not for everybody. Let’s say you are a sales person who does sales part-time for a company and on a commission basis for sales production. You need not register just to be able to give out receipts because it is your company’s obligation to you and your clients to write the official receipt, after they it is they who are running the business and not you. You only sell their products for a commission.
If however, you decide, “I can do what they do, I know a cheaper supplier, and I know the territory”, well this is a different story. If you decide to go at it yourself by setting up shop but then your market are home makers or mothers, something this small scale, well you could register, it is totally up to you. But if your market are companies, organizations, the government, then you might need to register your business.
Take note, having a SEC or a DTI certificate “alone” is not a permit to do business.
