If your company does business under another name rather than their registered name, you likely have a DBA (also known as a Doing Business As, Trade Name, or Fictitious Business Name) filed with either the State or the County where you are registered.  Some of these names are one and done – you file it once and it exists in perpetuity.  Others have an expiration date.  But what happens if the registration expires before a renewal is filed?  It is entirely possible that the company may lose the rights to that name if someone else files a DBA with the State using it for their own company.  If you operate under that name, that could cause a huge headache and financial burden because legally, you are no longer able to use that DBA – meaning anywhere you used your DBA like your website, your logo, or your marketing materials, to name a few things – may have to be changed.  Obviously, keeping your DBA can be a huge deal.

You already knew you had a yearly obligation to us to pay your registered agent invoice.  You likely knew you have an obligation to every state you are registered in to file an annual report (in most cases) and pay a filing fee or make a franchise tax payment every year.  You knew about your federal tax obligations.  And now you have something else you have to worry about?  And where do you file – state or county?  How much is it?  And how often?

Great news – Incserv has a new, much-anticipated service called DBA renewal auto-file service.  We take care of managing everything for you and ensure that you don’t lose your DBA name.  We have all the details – the fees, the filing location, the expiration date, and the renewal period.  If something changes, like the fee or the renewal period, we’re on top of it.  We make sure the filing gets done so you can keep your name and check this item off your list without you having to worry about it.

Interested?  Let us know which DBAs you’d like for us to handle.

But what about if you want to take care of this yourself?  You’re welcome to do so, of course.  Incserv stores the expiration date and the renewal period for each DBA in Snapshot, our online client portal.  You can easily login and check the portal to see what DBAs are expiring soon.  Just want to check which ones you have filed?  This information is stored in Snapshot too!  Check the Entities table (use the “DBA” option at the top), or select the company that has a DBA then navigate to the DBA tab to see what DBAs have been filed for that entity.  Is one missing?  Let us know and we can get it added!

Please note all elected DBAs stored in our system have an annual nominal fee for housing and SOP purposes.

Interested in learning more about DBAs?  Shoot us an email; we’ll be happy to help!

Sara Flanagan, Systems Analyst