Unlocking Online Signature Legality for Corporations in Canada

How to eSign a document: online signature legality for corporations in Canada

in this video i'm going to teach you how to file your corporation's annual return i want to put this video together because i've noticed that there's a lot of people that have this endless debate of you know should i be a sole proprietor or should i actually incorporate my business and a lot of people actually really want to incorporate their business they want some of the benefits that come with it but they get worried that the administration burden is going to be too high it's going to be so complex so what i want to do in this video is actually walk you through step by step we're going to file an annual return actually for my corporation we're going to fill it out together and we're going to try to do it in less than 10 minutes time so we're going to take you start to finish from the notice all the way to the filing and we're going to see can we actually make this happen in under 10 minutes so like anything in life you could always hire someone to do this for you you know you can make it really complicated but particularly for those of you that are starting out and those of you that are the sole owner of your company so if you are kind of owning a hundred percent of the shares you are the the sole director the the sole individual with 100 ownership of your company i'm going to show you just how simple it can be to file your annual return you can use an example from alberta because that's where i happen to be based but you'll find that the the concept and the principle behind it is very similar regardless of what province or what state or wherever in the world you may happen to be obviously you know all the same caveats and disclaimers you know check the details of where you live but what i really want you to do is to see that this process can actually be quite demystified and it doesn't have to be something that you feel like you absolutely must hire someone to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on so let's get started all right so next up what i'm going to do is share my screen and i'm going to show you step by step how we're going to go about filling out a corporation's annual returns what you see before you hear right now is the email notice that i actually received from our provincial registry saying hey nudge nudge your annual return is due now and you'll see in here they've sent along a particular form they've actually populated a few sections of it already for me they've provided all the instructions and you know where i'm gonna send it what i need to do with it and they've also included a link to where i will actually submit that to a registry office now your province or your state may or may not send you that reminder so i'm gonna walk you through the process that you would go through if for some reason you didn't get this email or you had somehow deleted it and couldn't trace back so we're gonna use a handy dandy tool called google which i'm sure you use all the time and i'm gonna populate alberta annual return because that's what i'm trying to actually populate here and you'll see all the search results that come up we're basically going to ignore anything that's a sponsor so an ad an ad we're looking for something that is from the government so we're looking for this one here we're seeing alberta.ca this is probably the right spot to go so this is going to take us and we can kind of recognize um this is the alberta logo you'll recognize something similar again for your state or your specific province or your specific jurisdiction you just want to kind of get a feel just kind of navigate a little bit of the way through and here you're going to see they've actually outlined it for us you know step one gather your information step two fill out the form and step three submit it somewhere so we're going to go through each of these steps for alberta but the exact same concept would apply if you were looking for something similar for let's try an ontario for example so let's say ontario annual report showed up here again we're going to ignore the ads we're going to look for one that says you know ontario.ca so this is probably the one we're going to be looking for and you'll be able to see on here on this page here's the filing requirements looks like here are the forms that you can find here's some contact information so you can kind of navigate something similar if that pertains to a different location but we are going to jump back to alberta because that's where i am and that's what we're filling out here so we're going to start with step one to actually download the form and we're gonna start to populate this actual uh form so let's pull it open here okay so let's actually populate it in here and we know that we're looking at the right form because it's an annual term for alberta and extra provincial corporation don't worry too much about extra provincial it probably won't apply to you if it does you've probably already met with the lawyer that's explained it to you but let's say you really want to make sure that you're doing it correctly what's really interesting i'll come back to this in a second you're going to see that the business corporations act and the specific sections are coming up here so after we populate it all we're actually going to go back to the act and we're going to give ourselves a little sense of comfort that hey did we do it okay did we do it correctly extra provincial typically means that you are a corporation that's not already in alberta or in your particular location but we're not going to go into we're not going to delve into any of that okay so step one pretty simple question what is the name of the corporation all right we're gonna put in our corporate access number so here you probably received a folder a scanned pdf document you would have received something at the point in time where you were incorporated that's going to identify your specific business number so in my case it's a document that looks a little bit like this and it actually lists on here what those numbers are for my business so i can just kind of find it on this simple you know one page document so i'm going to populate that in here and you'll notice that if we were actually using the one that was sent in the email they actually helped us out quite a bit and populated all of these fields ahead of time and the data formation that is really just asking when did your uh when did you incorporate your business so in my case we're gonna go back to and and you'll know that from there's really only gonna be one date it's gonna be the date that you actually went through all of those processes so you'll go back and you look in your own records for that and the return we're filling this out for 2021 and are we amending an annual return in the past well no this is actually the first one that we're doing so we're not amending anything we're going to skip question number six it doesn't apply to us our current corporation address so this is where you're gonna populate again where your corporation is um where where you've registered the address and another pretty simple question you're gonna populate what is your email address all right so let's read this little section under here there's been a change to the corporation's address or agent of service if it was not previously reported so my case there was no change to the address there was no change to the contact person so we're going to skip through that one as well current agent for service in this case this may be something you would use if you were like hiring a lawyer to fill this out for you but in my case it is simply myself i am the agent for my own corporation so has there been a change of the directors well no i was the director before and the director after so there has been no change of directors so we're going to skip that and current shareholders this is where we're going to identify you know have new people bought into our company have we raised equity have we maybe given our employees a portion of ownership in the company and you'll see in this case actually no there's no shareholder changes since the last report and so the current shareholders for this year are listed down here below you'll notice it says last name slash corporation name that's because a corporation can own another corporation but in this case the shareholder is actually going to be myself you get to find out what my middle name is [Music] and again you're going to notice that this is not applicable because i'm not a corporation i'm the individual that owns these shares and what percentage of the voting shares do i have well it happens to be 100 now all the sections down here below would be where you would list all the various other shareholders and people that have ownership interest into your company uh you would not identify your bank or any of the loans or creditors because they are in 99 of the time they're people that are lending you money but they don't have equity interest so this would really still be only yourself as the one with ownership so we're going to skip all of this here section because again we want to make sure that everything tallies up to 100 but because i'm representing 100 then there we go authorized representative is going to be myself relationship to the corporation let's take a look at what the options are in here i happen to be a director of the company and the date of the submission is and we'll add in a phone number in here okay and that is it for completing the actual form so let's go and read a few of the instructions i know i jumped right in and we didn't look at the instructions initially you would fill out and this is kind of a bit of a recap of everything that we did so we used the particular form we filled it all out again some of the fields in there were really kind of asking more so if someone was filling this out on your behalf or if there were multiple owners but you can see that really what i was populated is my name and my address my contact information because i am the sole owner i have 100 ownership of the company everything in here is just a little bit of a recap of what we actually populated items one two three four five six everything was in here we've actually completed each of these steps these are just instructions if you were really stuck and you wanted to know like what does this mean what do i put under here it actually includes instructions in there already for you so now we are going to save and print because you'll notice that it's asking for a signature on here all right so we've completed the first step which is to fill up the form now we need to actually give the form to someone right we need to give it to a service provider and in the case of alberta there is not a provincial department that is acting as a service provider they have privatized it so different providers operate their own business so we can go and choose one of the different service providers that are in here so let's just take a little look and see okay we're doing a basic registration and how i know it's a basic registration if we kind of come down here annual return for corporations is something very basic it's something that happens every single year if you really weren't sure and you're like well am i looking for level one level two level three don't worry about it it's just telling me where you can go someone that would do more complex thing is also probably likely to accept a very simple case all we're doing in here is trying to figure out where do we actually bring this information to we'll take a little look here and we'll choose what registry we want now in this case i actually typed in one of the registry offices that i've used in the past just to renew my driver's license that type of thing so that's why i kind of knew exactly where they were not particular endorsement for them you can always go with anyone any registry office or option available to you if you remember what stage and what step we're on if we kind of go back in here and you can see that our step one was to gather the information step two is to actually fill out the form and now step three is we're gonna actually take this information and we're gonna bring it to the registry office so what i'm doing right now is step three i'm actually tracking down the registry office and uh this is the one that we're actually looking for their websites will all be a little bit different so you might need to navigate a little bit through i'll go through services i'm obviously not looking for automotive and a lot of times what you're going to do is just go through a process of elimination i know i'm going to corporate registry but you could kind of look through all of these and say well what is all of that stuff it's corporate registry pretty much anything is going gonna say corporate it's gonna say anything along those lines it's gonna be what you're looking for now you might look at some of this and again feel a little bit overwhelmed because these are gonna be different for each and every single provider we're looking for something that has annual return one of the things that sometimes people can get really overwhelmed they look at all of these different options they say oh my goodness i have no idea what all of this means and the truth is you don't need to know what it means you just need to find the one that pertains to the the service that you're actually trying to submit so in this case we're trying to submit an annual return let's actually click on it and let's see what their instructions are oh look looks like they have it online and it looks like download the form it looks like we actually could have got the form from them directly but that's okay all right so here we are i got the forms and paperwork with me just about to go into the registry office i'm gonna give them the forms i'm gonna pay them the money i don't think i can film in there but i will let you know how it goes whenever i get out all right so there you have it no lineup or anything i've got all of my receipt it's all paid and in the works and the annual corporation report has been filed and good to go so i hope what you can take away from this is that filing these forms is definitely something figure outable you can absolutely figure it out just take your time with it go step by step and uh it'll get easier every single year and basically you're free and off the hook for the next 364 days so good job