Registering a company (also known as incorporating a company) can be a scary process for people when they are first starting out.
While there are some small administrative burdens that go with formally incorporating a company, there are also many benefits to doing so.
If you have decided that this is the right step forward for you, you are probably wondering what to do next. The process is relatively straightforward, but there are certain parts that can be tricky to an untrained eye.
That’s why we have written this complete guide where we will walk you step-by-step through the entire process, from start to finish.
Things you will need AYou can check to see if the name you want is already registered here and read our notes on picking a good company name here . At least one person who is EEA resident and is willing to be a Director of the company. Someone (or a company) that is willing to become the Company Secretary of the company. The Director and the Company Secretary can be the same person, but if they are, you will need to find a second Director. Each Director will need to have a PPS number. If they don’t have a PPS number, they will first need to get a VIF Number . An account with the CRO . It’s free to sign up. Before we get started, the below process can take around an hour or so and the Companies Registration Office (CRO) will charge you €50 . It will then take 10 days for your company to be approved by the CRO.
Once you are incorporated, the law says that your company needs to have the following things:
Share certificates for each of the shareholders; A register of Shareholders; A register of Company Secretaries; and A register of the Directors. Note: there are other required registers and obligations but we just listed the three most obvious above.
If you want it done CHEAP, FAST and CORRECT If you want to save yourself the hassle of working through the below and figuring out how to prepare share certificates and registers, Open Forest will do the incorporation for you for €99 (including the €50 CRO fee AND VAT!) cheapest price on the Irish market. We can also do it in 5 days , compared with the 10 days it will take for your application to be approved.
We will provide you with the required documents so you can stay focussed on more important parts of your business.
In addition to that, if you incorporate through Open Forest, we will give you access to the Open Forest platform
If our unbeatable deal hasn’t convinced you and you, for some reason, want to put yourself through the tedious process below, then make yourself a cup of tea and roll up your sleeves!
Step 1 - Register for a CRO Account First, head on over to the CRO’s CORE portal here and “Create a New Core Account”.
The registration form speaks for itself and is relatively painless.
Step 2 - Apply to Incorporate a Company Once that is done, log in to your account and choose “New Filing ” on the left hand side followed by “Form A1: Application to Incorporate a Company ” near the bottom right of your screen. See the image below for more.
Now follow the below steps in order of how they appear on the CRO form:
Note: if there is a section on the CRO form and we don’t mention below, then just leave it as it is and don’t change anything.
Step 2.0 - Company Details Keep the “Fé Phráinn ” button unchecked.
Company Type Under “Company Type”, choose “Private Company Limited by Shares (LTD) ”.
Company Name Keep scrolling down until you get to “Have you reserved a company name? ”. Only change this to Yes if you have previously registered a business name with the CRO and if you have a “Reserved Name Number ” that will be listed in a document the CRO would have sent you when you registered that name.
For most people, you will keep that option set to “No” and then go to the “Company Name ” part.
Put in the name that you want and then press “Search”.
This will search the CRO’s system for any similar or exact names. If it finds a similar or exact name, then the following orange warning will appear:
If this happens, take a second look here to see what names might be conflicting. You might need to use the “advanced search ” as the CRO’s main search doesn’t work too well.
If there is already an exact match in the system, you might still be able to get a similar name but you have to be clever and add some additional words. “Open Forest” might need to become “Open Forest Legal” or “Open Forest Services”. Other popular add-ons are “Ireland”, “Solutions”, “Holdings” etc. Ideally though, you will find something unique because sometimes the CRO will refuse names that just have “Holdings” added as they are not distinguishable enough.
Note: if the CRO reject your chosen name because it is not unique enough - that will add to the 10 day approval process.
Going back to the form, if you do find something unique, you will get the below, which means you should get the name you want without issue - but the CRO has the last say in all name choices!
If you still want to try to get a similar name to your chosen brand, and it is NOT an exact (or really close) match of a company already on the register, you might have a chance of it being approved anyway - if it is different enough.
You’ll probably still get the above orange warning, but that is not a definite “no”, you will just have to wait to see if the CRO approves it during their review.
After you are happy with the name, choose “limited” from the Legal Ending option. The “limited”, means that your liability for anything that might go wrong with the company is limited. You can read more about limited liability here.
Email Details Now that the name is sorted, you need to input the Company’s email address.
It can be your own email address or you could set up a company email address like [email protected]
NACE Next up is the “nature of business” code. This is a list of thousands of possible activities that your new company could be doing. Your job is to pick the one that is closest to what your new company will do.
The CRO will not question this in their review, but the obligation is on you to pick the most appropriate code.
Address Details Skip the “Registered Office” section and leave it set to “No” (unless you know what you are doing and then you wouldn’t be reading this guide anyway) and go ahead and put in the address that the company will be based at.
It is common to put down a residential address, usually one of the directors or shareholder’s address to start - but you should know that this address can be seen on the CRO public register - if anyone bothers to check those things!
That gets us to the end of the first page, only 10 more to go (seriously)!
Let us take a last opportunity to remind you that we can do this filing for you, and give you lots of benefits for the lowest price on the market. If you’ve had enough, just click here. We promise, we ask you way less questions than the CRO does!
Step 2.1 - Appoint New Director / Secretary Directors
Now let’s add some directors.
For now, choose the Director button twice (see above) and then enter the details of the first director.
Repeat this process for each director that you want to appoint.
As we mentioned above, you will also need to appoint a person (or a company) to be the “company secretary”. If you want the company secretary to be the same person as the first director, then you will need a second director.
If you already plan on having two directors on the Board, then any one of them can also be the company secretary.
Company Secretary
After the Directors have been chosen, click “Add” and you will see the following popup:
This time choose “Secretary” under both sections (the second option will appear when you choose Secretary once), and go ahead and fill in the details of who is going to be the Company Secretary.
The Company Secretary is the person (or company) responsible for keeping the Company’s records and legal registers up to date, and making the filings with the CRO. Open Forest does provide this service as part of our “future proof” incorporation package so that you don’t have to spend time worrying about this. The price we charge for this works out around €130 per year which is the lowest price on the Irish market.
Once the above is done, click on Next.
Step 2.2 - Other Directorship Details
The CRO needs to know if any of the proposed directors are already directors of any other companies, in Ireland or elsewhere.
Choosing the “Add Other Directorship” button above will allow you to choose the relevant director and input details of each of their other companies. The CRO only wants details of companies from the past 5 years.
You can choose whether or not the company is Irish and if it is, you only need to input that company’s registered number or name and the CRO will automatically fill in the rest.
Once all relevant companies are registered, move to the next page.
Step 2.3 - Company Share Capital This section is divided into two parts:
Authorised Share Capital, and Issued Share Capital. Authorised Share Capital Think of Authorised Share Capital as the maximum amount of shares that you want your company to be able to issue .
You can choose to set this as any number. If you set it at 100, for example, then you may run into “headroom” issues pretty quickly - although that depends on the type of company you are setting up. If you are just setting up a basic company with just you involved (say perhaps you are a tradesperson or a freelancer or consultant) then this could be fine.
However, if you are a company that plans on raising money from Angels or the PSSF or giving out shares to early employees as part of an employee option scheme, then you will need to set a higher Authorised Share Capital to ensure you avoid hitting the ceiling. A lot of companies set their Authorised Share Capital at 1 million shares.
In fact, there is actually no legal requirement to set any Authorised Share Capital at all . So, you can just skip over this section which avoids setting any “ceiling” at all. This is the option we take for our customers here at Open Forest.
If you make the wrong choice, don’t worry, it can be changed at any time in the future. It just needs a bit of legal magic to do so - but that does come with a cost so best to get it right from the very start. If you’re still unsure, reach out to us and we can guide you through it.
Issued Share Capital Issued Share Capital is the number of shares that are actually issued from the Authorised Share Capital.
“Issued” means given out to someone, and that someone will become a shareholder (or owner) in the company.
This section needs a little bit of forethought. You can issue any amount of shares to the shareholders of your company (so long as it’s not more than your Authorised Share Capital allows), the important thing to remember is that you should issue the shares in proportion to the percentage of the pie you want each person to own (more about this later).
If it’s just you that will be a shareholder/owner, go ahead and issue 1 share, or 10 shares, or 77 shares, or 100,000 shares. It really doesn’t matter. Remember, shareholders get shares - directors don’t have to get anything (unless they happen to be the same person).
If there is going to be more than one person, think about how many shares each person is going to get and issue that total amount.
Back to the form - later on, we will choose which person gets what number of shares but for now, just issue the total amount that will be given out later.
Note: At Open Forest, we issue 100 shares for every 1% so that would be 10,000 shares in total.
Just remember, whatever amount of shares you issue, has to be the same as or less than the Authorised Share Capital maximum that you set in the previous section. If you didn’t set a maximum like we suggested, then you can issue as many shares as you want.
To issue shares, click “Add” above and then enter the following:
The above are just our suggestions and can be amended to suit your needs, but again, if you knew of a good reason to depart from our above suggestions, you wouldn’t need this article anyway.
Once you hit “Save” you can move on to the next page.
Step 2.4 - Subscribers to Memorandum Generally, the subscribers are going to be the same people that are going to be the initial shareholders of the company. These are the same people that will have to sign the Company Constitution later on in the process.
So for now, go ahead and click “Add” and then add the details of every person that you are going to give shares to.
Once you have done that, you will be able to generate a company constitution. The constitution can be thought of as the “bible” of the company , and usually contains the rules on how the company runs day-to-day.
At this stage though, the constitution is usually just a very short one page document. Click “Generate Constitution” below and it will create the document you need. It’s not the most robust document but it will do the job for now. Double check everything is correct on the document.
Sign in the signature box (see below) and a witness must also sign and date the document and include their full address. Once signed and witnessed, notice in the image above the option to “Upload File”. Choose that and upload the signed document. Then move to the next page.
Step 2.5 - Declaration
In this section, you should choose the person that is going to sign the declaration form. It’s best to just choose yourself, assuming you are adding yourself as a director of the company. If not, choose one of the directors or the Company Secretary.
Fill in the rest of the details, including the address of the company and the “Central Administration Office” which is just the registered office of the company that you chose on the first page of the form.
Choose Next.
Step 2.6 - Constitution Here is where the “subscribers” are chosen. For your purposes, the subscribers will be the shareholders of the company.
Click the “Add” button above and then input the appropriate details for each shareholder as per the below image. In the example below, we are giving John Smith 50,000 shares. You will remember earlier that we said we give out 1,000 shares per every 1% of the company, so the below means John Smith will be a 50% shareholder and we will have to add the second 50% shareholder after this.
If you don’t know what should go into Share Class, then just type in “Ordinary”, or you can read more about share classes here.
Then go ahead and input your address and in the “Description” field, input the shareholder’s occupation.
Repeat that process for every shareholder.
Step 2.7 - Verification On the Verification page, check the box that certifies the below statement and then choose the signature method chosen below.
You will then need to add every director and the secretary using the below section. Be sure you don’t miss any of the directors or else the form will be rejected.
Step 2.8 - Summary We’re almost there!
This page will give you a summary of everything you have chosen in the form. Take a close read and make sure everything is correct before hitting the submit button.
If there are any errors, they will be listed so just take your time fixing them.
If everything is correct, you will land on a thank you page with an option to “Sign”. Choose Sign and you will see the below options.
You need to then download the signature file, have the directors, shareholders and company secretary sign in the appropriate places and then upload the document on the same page under the “Upload Signature File” space in the image above.
Finally, after all that is done, you will be brought to the payment page and will have to pay €50 to the CRO for the company incorporation fee.
Congratulations, you’re all done! Wasn’t so bad was it?
Next Steps All that’s left to do now is wait 10 business days for approval. If anything is wrong with the application, the CRO will reach out and let you know what needs to be changed. The most common ones are names that are too close to existing company names.
Open Forest Even if you went through the incorporation process above yourself, there is still a huge amount of value that the Open Forest platform can provide and it is free to sign up (you will need your CRO company number to do so).
Once you get that, be sure to check back and sign up so that you can stay on top of all your legal obligations.
We have a free tier on the platform that still offers lots of value for founders.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How much does it cost to register a company in Ireland? The standard CRO fee is €50 for company registration. Alternative services like Open Forest charge €99 , which includes the CRO fee, VAT, and additional support services.
What are the minimum requirements for incorporating an Irish company? You need at least one EEA-resident director, a company secretary (who can be the same person if there's a second director), and a PPS number for each director. You'll also need a unique company name and registered office address.
How long does it take to register a company in Ireland? The standard CRO processing time is 10 business days. If using a service provider like Open Forest, this can be reduced to 5 business days.
What happens after the company is registered? After registration, the company must maintain various registers and documentation, including share certificates, a register of shareholders, company secretaries, and directors. The company must also comply with ongoing filing obligations.
Can one person set up a limited company in Ireland? Yes, but you will need both a director and a company secretary. If you are the sole director, you must appoint a separate person or company to act as company secretary.
How do I start my own business? Begin by choosing your business structure (sole trader or limited company), register with the CRO if incorporating, obtain necessary licenses or permits, register for tax with Revenue , set up a business bank account, and ensure proper insurance coverage.
How to create a business name? Choose a unique name that isn't already registered with the CRO, ensure it's distinguishable from existing names, avoid restricted words, and consider adding distinctive terms like "Services" or "Solutions" if your preferred name is similar to existing ones.
What is the difference between a company name and a trading name? A company name is your business's legal identity registered with the Companies Registration Office (CRO). It must include "Limited" or "Ltd" at the end and appears on all official documents, tax returns, and legal paperwork. For example, "Smith Consulting Limited."
A trading name, also called a business name, is what you use to promote and operate your business publicly. It doesn't require "Limited" and can be completely different from your company name. For instance, Smith Consulting Ltd might trade as "The Digital Marketing Experts." Trading names must be registered with the CRO if they differ from your company name, excluding only the word "Limited."
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