Getting a North Dakota certificate of authority on your own

The exact entity name, formation date and place, the officers, managers or partners the application lists, a principal executive office with a street address, and an agent who has agreed. The home certificate is the one item that comes from someone else.

Request a certificate of good standing or existence from the home state filing office, authenticated by its officer. For a nonprofit, the name on the certificate and application must match exactly.

Use the portal's business search for a conflicting name. The state's test is whether a name is distinguishable on the record, and the final call is the Secretary of State's.

An LLC gives management details. A corporation lists directors and officers and its purpose in the state. A limited partnership lists each general partner and says whether it is an LLLP. An LLP states its expiry in the home jurisdiction and acknowledges its status here ends if it lapses at home.

Your work queue in the portal lists each filing with its status, correction requests and issued certificates. Correct what is asked and resubmit.

The home certificate arrives late. The agent never agreed or has no North Dakota address. The wrong application version was chosen. The entity name differs between the certificate and the form. The report date for the entity type was taken from the wrong place.

Take the application one screen at a time. The portal presents the form for the entity family you picked, and the questions follow the statute for that family. Read each prompt, answer from your formation record and not from memory, and stop at any question you cannot answer. The pieces people most often guess at are the date of formation, the duration and the street address of the principal executive office.

A personal login ties the filing to you alone. A business login can be shared, and every user can see every filing for the organization, including any corrections the office asks for. If an accountant or manager will take over the yearly report later, set up the business login from the start.

Save the certificate of authority in a folder next to the formation papers and whichever home certificate you relied on. Then note the entity's annual report date. For an LLC that is November 15 and for a foreign corporation May 15, starting the year after authorization. Add a second reminder for the home-state report, since a lapse there affects your ability to certify standing later.

The state fee, the home certificate and your time. An LLC that applies and files one report pays $185 to the state. Changes along the way carry their own fees. Registering a trade name costs $25, swapping in a new agent costs $10, and leaving the state costs $20. Put one report and an eventual withdrawal in the plan and the LLC's state charges come to $205 in all. Settling that figure before you start avoids surprises later, whichever route you take. See the fee page.

The office returns an application that does not conform. Typical causes are the entity name typed differently from the certificate's, a noncommercial agent with no address, or an entity-specific item left blank. Fix only what the message asks, resubmit, and keep a note of the date.

$199 plus the state fee, including your first year of registered agent service; after that the agent service renews at $149 a year.