Finally, we made it, we did what we have dreamt about for a long time! Created a Company! And now The Journey Begins!
It started out with a few friends wanting to create games together on our spare time. However it escalated fast to “why don’t we do this for real?”. So we made a game-plan of what to do to just create a company here in Norway. Based on some experience and some googling we ended up with this:
- Come up with a name for the company
- What type of company
- Should we have an accountant?
- Create Business Plan
- Everyone should have BankID (more on this later)
- Have an Annual General Meeting
- Create a Memorandum (Stiftelsesdokument)
- Create the company statutes (Vedtekter)
- Get an account at a Bank
- Pay 30 000 NOK to the Bank
- Get the bank to confirm the payment to the government
- Coordinated register notification (Samordna registermelding)
- Get registered in Enhetsregisteret
- Get registered in Foretaksregisteret
- Get bank login and a debit/credit card
- Conquer the world!
Easy right? Well… this is what happened.
Planning
Ok so we made the Business plan, it was easy to just find some documents online and just fill in the information that suited us. Our vision, our goals, our economy etc. Took about a weekend to create something we agreed on. The same goes for the Memorandum and statutes. Pretty straight forward.
The name of the company however… Not. That. Easy. It was 2017, everything else was taken… So we settled on something we all agreed on sounded nice and included everyone. Ananki! You figure it out!
We even held an Annual General Meeting where we created the board, delegated responsibilities and approved the documents and signed them electronically. However, it would soon become obvious that we could perhaps skip that step.
Altinn
In Norway we have this website that should be the centerpoint of most of the government documents etc. This is also where we register our companies. And this is the best part of this whole ordeal! Since we already had created the Memorandum and Statutes we were done founding the company in 30 minutes. This is because we all had BankID, which is a secure way to identify us when we logged in. We could just copy & paste the information we already agreed on and it was signed by all an done! Yay!
In our haste we just continued trying to register for Enhetsregisteret and Foretaksregisteret. But… we were just a bit too fast. Life is not that easy. No fault to Altinn, which is really great!
The Banks
Let’s get back to BankID.
With BankID, your enterprise can identify 3.7 million Norwegians digitally. That means you can carry out secure transactions, establish and maintain good customer relations and enter into and sign binding agreements.
-bankid.no
Most Norwegians can log into their bank online using BankID. It works great, and most of us has it already. We can also login to other sites that makes use of BankID, usually government sits like Altinn.
So we started out with creating an account at DNB which is Norway’s biggest bank. They even have some nice offers for people wanting to create their own company. The problem however was that we had to fill in a ton of information about us online and we had to even repeat a lot of it through god-knows-how-many-forms. Not a good experience… When we were done, we thought that this was it and we would have an account in no-time.
We got an answer from DNB saying they needed 3 months of our PRIVAT account statement. Just to make sure they money was not tied to some “funny-business”….
We have a HARD time understanding why they want to know what we spend money on should have anything to do with us putting OUR money into their bank… Perhaps they should be more concerned about where we GET our money, like the payslip from our work???
Anyway, we decided to change bank! One of us had an account in Nordea, so we tried that.
If memory serves right, I don’t think they even had an online form to register as a new company… 2017. The digital age (or are we past that already?). 2017!!
Back to pen and paper then. At least they don’t care about our private spendings… However it was not that easy of course! Let’s return to BankID!
Even though we all had BankID, and could login happily into our own banks online. For some reason, for some insane reason, we still had to identify us to the bank. At least those of us that did not have any affiliation with the bank prior to this. So what is the the meaning of having a BankID if you can’t ID yourself at the BANK!?
We had to just accept we were back in the dark ages, and man up and make sure it was not on us to prolong this process. So after we identified ourselves with our passports, then we could continue the process…
It went pretty ok after that, we got an account, paid the 30 000 NOK and got the bank to say it was all ok. It took a week or more, but, hey, it was not that bad. The bank even paid the fee for registering with Foretaksregisteret (with our money of course).
But to do anything in 2018 you need a debit/credit card. And for some reason we had to sign and send in another batch of papers for that…
And we waited…. and we waited… and we waited…
And we contacted the bank over and over and over and over…
And finally, over a month after we sent the papers we got access to our money in their bank! Yay….. But alas, no debit/credit card! Yet….
At least now we can conquer the world!
