There are quite a number of businesses in Nigeria running and carrying out daily transaction and affairs without the proper step of being registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). The truth of the matter is that most of these businesses not being registered is not in any way an attempt to defraud the government or anyone, neither is it in attempt to not pay taxes. The simple reason why so many businesses are not registered is because they don’t know how to go about the registration.
Those that partially know about the registration know it as one very tedious exercise that spans over a period of a couple of weeks and involves you visiting the CAC office a few times during which you’ll need to part ways with some few amount of cash for different stages of the registration process. Or optionally, you could simply pay agents from N25,000 upwards to run the registration errand for you… but not anymore.
On the 2nd of February 2015, the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) launched a 24-hour online registration platform to fast track its business services to customers. It was created in response to the call for a better and more technological advanced option to be created for business registration. You can now register your business and also have access to the services offered by the corporate affairs commission via the online registration portal. This online registration service is quite simple and straightforward, and it is simply in line with CAC’s call for Nigerian business owners to register their businesses.
How do you register your business via the online registration platform?
- Log on to the CAC registration website via http://new.cac.gov.ng/home.
- Just in the middle of the page, you’ll find a sentence prompt that reads “Click here to go to Company Registration Portal (CRP).
- Click on the sentence and it would redirect to http://services.cac.gov.ng/ via another tab. So be sure to check for an additional browser tab.
- On the CRP page, click on “Create Account” to create your person CRP account.
- Fill the form correctly and submit it. (You don’t necessarily have to use your intended business name as your username).
- It is important you have a National Identification Number (NIN) issued by the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC).
- If your registration is successful, you would be given a password which you’ll use for your first log in.
- After logging in, you’ll be required to change the password to an option of your choice.
- You’ll be presented with the name search page, which means your company/business name is ready to be registered (if it’s ‘vacant’. That is, if the name is yet to be chosen. Business name search in the United States can be of a good use here).
- Fill in the two name options you want to search for and proceed to the next page, where you’ll give more info about your business. Fill this page carefully by correctly selecting your business “Classification”, your “Company type”, your “Reason for (name) availability search” and the “General nature of your business”.
- After correctly filling in the tabs on this page, you’ll proceed to where you’ll submit basic information about yourself and your business. Information like your date of birth, nationality, country of residence, residential address, identity type, identity number and identity issue state; would need to be filled correctly.
- After this proceed to make a payment of N500 and your name search would begin in earnest. CAC would get back to you via the email you provided to finish up your registration in a couple of days as soon as the name you chose has been taken in as your business name.
Note:
- You might not be able to proceed in the absence of your National Identification Number, so it’s important you get that first.
- The CRP accepts almost every form of cards and it has a secure payment channel.
- If after a week you don’t receive a mail from CAC, you should log back in to the CRP to confirm your name search status yourself.
The CAC online registration can really see you register your business without physically setting foot in any CAC office since you can submit the forms online and you can make the payments via their website.