Hi all,

I've mentioned on meta and briefly on this list the practicalities of company formation.

I know that everyone is keen for us to register the company and complete all the other formalities as fast as reasonably possible so that we can hand over to a Board which can start doing things that actually fulfill our objects! I have been thinking of the ways we can register with Companies House in the quickest and easieist way, given that the five directors live in different parts of the country.

I've come up with three main ways:

1) Form full company from the start, by post

Each initial Director has to sign paper form (Form 10, the Memorandum and the Articles) where they "consent to act" and "agree to form the Company". This is because Company House's webfiling system does not allow you to submit these forms directly online and the Software Filing service, which allows commercial company formation agents to file online, is generally used only for companies formed with standard Memorandum & Articles.

The advantage of this method is that the company is formed with all the correct directors and members from the start.

In practice, we would have to get each of the directors to print, sign and post a copy of the signature pages to the company secretary who then puts them all together and submits them to Companies House.

2) Form full company from the start, by meeting

An alternative is to arrange a physical meeting where all five directors get together and sign the papers. This would take time to organise.

3) Form single member, single director company and then appoint remaining directors on incorporation

The third option is to form the company with a single member and a single director (being me). I would sign all the forms myself, submit to Companies House and then admit the other directors as members and appoint the others as directors as soon as the company is formed

This way the other directors can sign their consent forms on-line using the webfiling system.

I think it would be easier and we would save time doing it this way. However, I would only want to do this if everyone was comfortable with this approach.

We would need a minor change to the standard Articles to reduce the minimum number of directors to one in the first month from incorporation.

How do people feel about this?

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