Steps to Register a Business Name in Uganda.

Steps to register a business name in Uganda are not too far to catch if due attention is paid to the lumps of opportunities that come with the process. As legal as registering your business name in Uganda is, the process has never been said to be either pocket-rending or mind-boggling as any taxing legal process, like it, can be. The registration of your businesses and business names is is important because of the following reasons or benefits:

• Obtain legal Identity/status
• Safeguard your business name by acquiring a trade name.
• Access opportunities like loans, tenders, financing etc.
• Business formalization creates more employment opportunities through business expansion.
• Enables registration for licenses e.g Investment, trading and taxation licenses.
• Better marketing and advertising opportunities for increased clientele
• Improved competitiveness in the regional market

Since you already know the importance of having your venture recognized, approved, and supported by the government (without the knowledge of which you wouldn’t be on this read in the first place), this article shall therefore be taking you through the things that you will need to do and how to do them in order to get your growing or startup business registered here in within the shores of Uganda.

Steps to Register a Business Name in Uganda.

Just like every other sovereign African nation, the Ugandan government has its own legally authorized platform on which practices such as monitoring the operations of new and existing business organizations and registering all business entities in the country are fully engaged for the benefit of the country’s economy in terms of growth and industrialization.

Here, however, are the careful steps to register a business name in Uganda, according to the Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB, Act Cap 210). The Bureau is responsible for the registration of public/private companies, foreign companies, and legal documents such as constitutions, agreements, deeds, powers of attorney, etc.

What then is a business name or how is registering it different from registering a business? A business name is the name or style under which any business is carried out whether in partnership or otherwise. A person may registered their business with its business name and then decides later to want to register a new name of itself. Or registering ones business name may be a case if before the person only had a subsidiary business registration.

This is different from a company because whereas a company is a separate legal entity with its own identity in law, a business name is only a name that you are allowed to use to indemnify yourself or your service in trade.

Registering a business name, though is the same as registering a business itself, helps the proprietor to carry on business under the registered name thereby distinguishing the owner’s business from that of others. Here’s what to do:

• Conduct a Search (using the business Registration form if you have already done so) and establish if the name you register is available for use;
• Pay the Registration fees;
• You will receive a certificate of registration of a business name.
• If any of these particulars change, the proprietor of the business name must file a notice of change in particulars.

2. Converting a Business Name into a Full Business

In a situation where you have already registered a business name without necessarily having a business of your own (it is understandable that you do so for security or any other personal reasons), to convert your business name into a company may have to take you through the following steps: