So the state approved your Articles of Organization. Congrats. You're officially a business owner now, and if you're anything like most first-time founders, you're sitting at your desk with a confirmation email open in one tab, a half-finished cup of coffee, and one pretty reasonable question: now what?
The thing nobody tells you when you form an LLC is that the filing itself is genuinely the easy part. What comes after is where most founders get tripped up, lose money, or accidentally undo the legal protection they just paid for. The next ninety days are where your LLC becomes a real, functioning business instead of just a name in a state database.
This guide walks through what actually has to happen now. We've ordered the steps roughly by priority, so if you only have a couple of hours this weekend, start at the top and keep going until you run out of time. We'll also cover the one federal rule that changed in 2025 and that most other guides still haven't caught up with.
1. Get Your EIN From the IRS
Your Employer Identification Number is a nine-digit federal tax ID issued by the IRS. Think of it as your business's Social Security number. You need one to open a business bank account, hire employees, file most business tax returns, and fill out W-9 forms when clients pay you.
The application itself is short. It's called Form SS-4, and it asks for things like your business name, the responsible party, and how you want the entity classified for tax purposes. None of the individual questions are hard, but a few of them have answers that aren't obvious if you haven't filed one before. The classification question for single-member LLCs is the one that catches most people, because the choice you make here interacts with how you'll be taxed down the road. The "responsible party" question is another one worth pausing on, because that person's information stays tied to the EIN going forward.
A couple of useful things to know. Single-member LLCs can technically use the owner's Social Security number for federal taxes, but most banks will not open a business account without an EIN, so almost every founder gets one anyway. Your EIN stays with your business for life unless you change your legal structure. A single-member LLC becoming a multi-member LLC, for example, requires a new EIN, and the IRS guidance on when to get a new EIN walks through the specific triggers.
You can get an EIN directly from the IRS for free. We offer it as part of our EIN service for founders who'd rather not deal with Form SS-4 themselves. We prepare the application from your formation details, review it before submission, and deliver the official IRS confirmation letter (the CP 575) to your dashboard. It's the document your bank will ask for.
2. Lock In Your Registered Agent
Every LLC in the United States has to have a registered agent. This is the person or company that receives legal papers, lawsuit notices, and official state correspondence on your behalf. The role exists because if someone sues your LLC, there has to be a real human at a real address who will accept the paperwork.
The U.S. Small Business Administration explains the basics on its registered agent page, but the rules are set by each state. The common requirements are:
- A physical street address in the state of formation. Not a P.O. box.
- Availability during normal business hours, Monday through Friday.
- Consent from the agent to serve.
You can technically be your own registered agent. We recommend against it for two reasons. First, your home address goes into the public record, which means anyone running a Secretary of State search can find where you live. Second, if you're at lunch when a process server shows up, or if you move and forget to update the state, you can miss a lawsuit and get hit with a default judgment without ever knowing you were sued.
Each state has its own quirks. California's Franchise Tax Board sends time-sensitive notices that you really do not want to miss. New York requires LLCs to publish their formation in newspapers in the county of the registered office (yes, in 2026, in actual newspapers). Florida's annual report deadline is May 1, and missing it triggers a $400 late fee. Texas calls the role a "registered agent" but lets a member of the LLC serve as long as they have a Texas street address.
If you want to keep your home address out of public records and not stress about being available 9 to 5 every day, we offer registered agent service in all 50 states, with email alerts whenever a document arrives.
3. Write Your Operating Agreement
The Articles of Organization you filed with the state created your LLC. The Operating Agreement is what actually runs it. It's an internal document that spells out who owns what percentage, how decisions get made, how profits are split, what happens if a member wants out, and what happens if a member dies.
Most states do not require you to file an operating agreement with the state, but a few legally require LLCs to have one in writing. California (under Corporations Code section 17701.02) and New York both require an operating agreement. Missouri and Maine have similar rules.
Even if your state doesn't require one, you want one anyway. Here's why.
Without an operating agreement, your LLC is governed entirely by your state's default LLC statute. Those default rules were written to be neutral and one-size-fits-all, which means they probably don't match how you actually want to run your business. Default rules typically split profits equally regardless of who put in capital, give every member equal voting rights regardless of ownership, and require unanimous consent for major decisions. If that's not what you and your co-founders agreed to verbally, you have a problem from the moment you have a disagreement.
For single-member LLCs, the operating agreement does something else important. It documents the separation between you and the business, which is a key piece of evidence courts look at when deciding whether to "pierce the corporate veil" and hold you personally liable for business debts. A single-member LLC with no operating agreement, mixed personal and business funds, and no formal records starts to look a lot like a sole proprietorship to a judge.
Banks will also frequently ask to see the operating agreement before opening a business account, especially for multi-member LLCs.
4. The BOI Question: What Most Articles Get Wrong
This section is going to contradict almost every other blog post you've read on this topic, so we want to walk through it carefully and link to the source so you can verify it yourself.
The Corporate Transparency Act, which took effect on January 1, 2024, originally required almost every small LLC and corporation in the United States to file a Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) report with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). For most of 2024 and early 2025, the rule was on, then off, then on again as it bounced through federal courts.
Then the rule changed in a way most websites have not caught up with. On March 21, 2025, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FinCEN announced an interim final rule, published in the Federal Register on March 26, 2025, that removed the BOI reporting requirement for U.S.-formed companies and U.S. persons. The official announcement is on the FinCEN news release page, and the current status is summarized on the BOI landing page at FinCEN.gov.
Here is what that means in plain English. If your LLC was formed in any U.S. state (which is the vast majority of readers of this article), you do not have to file a BOI report. You and your LLC are now exempt under federal law. The only entities still required to file are foreign companies (formed under the laws of another country) that registered to do business in a U.S. state, and even those entities are not required to report any U.S. persons as beneficial owners.
Two things to keep in mind. First, FinCEN has indicated this is an "interim final rule" and is accepting public comments, so it could in theory change again. We do not expect it to swing back, but it's worth checking fincen.gov/boi once or twice a year. Second, if a website or service is currently charging you to file a BOI report for a U.S.-formed LLC, you are paying for a filing that the federal government no longer requires and is no longer accepting from domestic entities. Save your money.
5. Open a Business Bank Account
This is the step that most first-time founders skip or delay, and it is also the step that does the most damage when it gets skipped. Running business income and expenses through your personal checking account is called "commingling funds," and it is one of the most common ways founders accidentally lose their LLC's liability protection.
When a court is asked whether to pierce the corporate veil and hold an LLC owner personally liable for the business's debts, one of the first questions it asks is whether the owner treated the business as a separate entity. Mixed-up bank statements are exhibit A. The protection that the LLC structure gives you only works if you actually act like the LLC and the human being are two different things.
To open a business account, you'll typically need:
- Your filed Articles of Organization (or a certified copy)
- Your EIN confirmation letter from the IRS
- Your operating agreement (especially for multi-member LLCs)
- A government-issued photo ID for each authorized signer
When opening a business account, there are a few things worth keeping in mind. First, watch out for monthly maintenance fees that kick in below a minimum balance. Those add up fast for a new business. Online-only banks are popular for software and service businesses because they don't charge monthly fees and integrate cleanly with bookkeeping software. Traditional banks make more sense if you handle a lot of cash or need in-person help. Whichever you pick, open the account before you take your first dollar of revenue. Trying to clean up commingled finances retroactively is a tax-season nightmare we have watched many founders go through.
6. Pick Your Tax Treatment
By default, the IRS treats a single-member LLC as a "disregarded entity" and a multi-member LLC as a partnership. In both cases the LLC itself pays no federal income tax. Profits flow through to the members, who report them on their personal returns. This is called pass-through taxation and is the default behavior unless you tell the IRS otherwise.
For a lot of small businesses, the default is fine. If your LLC is your side hustle or you're netting under $50,000 a year, electing anything else usually creates more paperwork than it saves you in taxes.
Once your net profit gets bigger, the math shifts. Default LLC profits are subject to self-employment tax at 15.3% on top of regular income tax. If you elect S-Corporation taxation by filing IRS Form 2553, you can split your income into a "reasonable salary" (which is subject to payroll tax) and distributions (which are not). For LLCs profiting roughly $60,000 a year and up, this can save several thousand dollars annually. The IRS has a useful overview at the S corporations page.
The catch is the deadline. To make the S-Corp election effective for the current tax year, you have to file Form 2553 within two months and 15 days of the start of that tax year. For a calendar-year LLC, that means March 15. For a brand-new LLC, you have 75 days from your formation date. Miss it, and the election applies to the following year, unless you qualify for late-election relief under IRS Revenue Procedure 2013-30.
S-Corp status also requires you to run actual payroll for yourself and pay yourself a defensible salary. That means a payroll service, quarterly tax filings, and a W-2 at year end. It is not free, and the savings only beat the costs above a certain income threshold. Talk to a CPA before you elect.
7. State and Local Compliance
Federal stuff is the same everywhere. State stuff is not. This is where having a checklist is the difference between a smoothly running business and a $400 late fee.
The big recurring obligations to check on:
- Annual or biennial reports. Most states require you to file a short report each year (or every two years) confirming your registered agent, address, and members. Florida, California, and Texas all have annual filing requirements with different deadlines and fees. Missing the deadline means late fees and, eventually, administrative dissolution of your LLC.
- Franchise tax. California charges every LLC an $800 minimum franchise tax annually regardless of revenue, due to the Franchise Tax Board. Texas has a franchise tax that only kicks in above a revenue threshold. Delaware charges a flat $300 a year. Wyoming is famously cheap. Know what your state charges and when.
- Business licenses. The federal SBA business license guide is a good starting point, but most licensing happens at the city or county level. Restaurants need health permits. Contractors need state contractor licenses. Even a one-person consulting LLC sometimes needs a city business tax certificate.
- Sales tax permits. If you sell taxable goods or services, you'll need to register with your state's department of revenue and start collecting and remitting sales tax. The rules around economic nexus also mean you may owe sales tax in states where you have no physical presence.
Our state compliance service tracks your annual report deadlines and files the report on your behalf each year. If you want documented proof of your good standing for a bank, investor, or out-of-state registration, you can also order a Certificate of Good Standing.
8. Set Up Bookkeeping Before Your First Dollar
Bookkeeping is the chore that nobody wants to think about and everybody regrets ignoring. The IRS expects you to keep records of business income and expenses, and the IRS recordkeeping page is the official baseline for what to track and how long to hang on to it.
Practically, you have two options. Either pick a bookkeeping app and connect it to your business bank account, or hire a bookkeeper. Both are fine. What's not fine is a shoebox of receipts and a vague hope that you'll figure it out at tax time.
A few rules of thumb that have saved our customers grief: keep digital copies of every receipt over $75 (the IRS threshold for documentation), categorize transactions weekly, not annually, save copies of all 1099s you receive and issue. And keep your business records for at least seven years, which covers the IRS audit window.
The hidden cost of skipping this step is not the bookkeeping software. It's the eight-hour weekend you spend in March of next year trying to reconstruct what a Stripe deposit from August was for.
9. Get Your Business Insured
The LLC structure protects your personal assets from business debts and lawsuits in most situations. It does not protect the business itself, and it does not protect you from your own professional negligence in many states.
Most small businesses need at least a general liability policy, which covers basic things like a customer slipping in your office or a product injuring someone. If you give professional advice (consulting, design, software), you also want professional liability insurance, sometimes called errors and omissions. If you have employees, most states require workers' comp.
The SBA insurance guide walks through the major categories. Small business insurance brokers will quote you in a few minutes online. For most service businesses, the whole package costs less than $1,000 a year. For comparison, the average small business lawsuit costs more than $50,000 to defend.
The 5 Mistakes That Sink First-Time LLCs
We see the same five mistakes over and over. The good news is they are all completely avoidable.
Mixing personal and business finances. Already covered above, but worth repeating. The single fastest way to lose your LLC's liability protection is to treat the business bank account like a slush fund. Pay yourself by transfer or owner's draw. Keep the categories clean.
Skipping the operating agreement. Especially for multi-member LLCs. Verbal agreements between friends fall apart the first time there's real money on the table. A two-page operating agreement signed at the start prevents most of the partner disputes we see.
Missing state deadlines. Annual reports, franchise taxes, registered agent renewals. Each state has its own calendar, and most states will administratively dissolve your LLC after a year or two of nonpayment. Reinstating a dissolved LLC is more expensive and more annoying than just paying the $50 on time.
Believing outdated information about BOI reporting. As we covered above, U.S.-formed LLCs no longer have to file BOI reports with FinCEN. If a service is charging you to file one, they're either out of date or hoping you are.
Treating the LLC like a brand instead of a legal entity. Your LLC is a legal structure, not a marketing identity. If you want to operate under a different name, file a DBA (doing business as), which we handle through our DBA registration service. If you want to operate in another state, file a foreign qualification. The LLC name on your Articles of Organization is the legal name. Treat it that way.
The first ninety days of your LLC's life are the foundation for everything that comes after. Get the EIN, lock in the registered agent, write the operating agreement, open the bank account, decide on tax treatment, calendar your state deadlines, set up the books, get insured. None of these steps are difficult on their own. The hard part is doing all of them, in order, before something else demands your attention.
If you want help with any of the formation or compliance pieces above, the team at CrowSmart handles all of it across all 50 states. And if you just want to read more, our entity guide compares LLCs, corporations, and nonprofits in plain English