An honest to-all founder, most of them, could not tell you what it is their corporate secretary does during the periods between annual filing seasons. Such a lack of knowledge is more perilous than it appears. The Singapore law is clear on this issue - any company registered here must have a qualified corporate secretary within six months. No extensions. No goodwill grace periods. ACRA is about to enforce the requirement constantly and the fines on non-payment increase as the situation stretches. Making such an appointment a low-priority administrative task is precisely the way businesses end up paying fines to fix issues that cost no prevention. Business owners often continue reading to understand company secretary service singapore obligations.
Most people are surprised when the true scope of the role is laid down. Director, shareholder, and share movement statutory registers should always be maintained to be current, not close to current, not kept abreast-when-it-suits-me current. Annual returns are submitted to ACRA on a regular basis according to your financial year. Before any major decisions have any legal effect, board resolutions must be duly drafted. AGMs require preparation and recorded minutes later. Beneath all that is a continuous deadline tracking capability that most founders would not be able to keep up with everything else that required their attention. The corporate secretary is simply the individual ensuring that the legal engine of your business does not malfunction on you as you are driving.
The quality of the providers differs beyond the pricing implications. Budget services perform regular filings without significant assistance. Go beyond the usual script - a change of director in the middle of the year, a restructuring of shares, a question on the part of ACRA - and you soon find out what makes up a basic package. The superior providers are more of a advisor within your compliance process. They emerge concerns in advance. They clarify intentions prior to decision-making as opposed to retrospectively. Such a difference is huge when you have something time-sensitive on your desk, yet it arrives suddenly.
The cost of corporate secretarial services in Singapore ranges between S 300 and S 1,500 annually, depending on the complexity of the company and the level of activity that the secretary must undertake in a given year. The high-transactions firms, regular movements of shares, active board, and multiple directors, are naturally placed on high end. Several companies have package deals involving secretarial services in addition to accounting and tax compliance. To most founders, bundling is more cost-effective and, at times, becomes cheaper than obtaining a single service at a time with a different vendor.
The most shrewd corporate secretaries are worth the money that they save by what they snare early as compared to what they put on time. A business constitution that is out of date (three years old). An anticipated transaction that silently results in other ACRA filing requirements. An expiry date that sneaked up in the middle of a busy quarter. It is these times that can make a difference between a truly valuable corporate secretary and one that merely passes documents through the system. And in case your existing provider has never flagged anything that was not in the standard workflow on its own, that silence may be something that you should look at more closely than you have done thus far.