One gateway, one register

A bookseller is preparing to open her shop and looks for the chamber of commerce where she is meant to file her paperwork, as she was told to. The formalities centre she calls no longer exists. She has set aside 1 200 € for start-up costs without knowing who to spend it with. Before you read: where are business formalities filed today, and in which register does the business get entered?

Since 1 January 2023, a single door

Formalities for starting, changing and ending a business activity have been filed online since 1 January 2023. The business formalities gateway replaced, on that date, the formalities centres that were spread across chambers of trade, court registries and social security bodies.

The gateway is operated by the national industrial property institute and is reached at procedures.inpi.fr. A founder no longer has to work out which body is competent for their activity: the gateway receives the filing and forwards it to the bodies concerned.

The change runs deeper than a website moving address. Filing at the wrong centre used to cost weeks, and the right centre depended on the nature of the activity. That question now belongs to the processing side, no longer to the person filing.

It is worth measuring what this centralisation removes. A single founder could previously fall under the chamber of trades for one part of their activity and the court registry for another, and had to arbitrate themselves between two counterparties that did not talk to each other.

The register that carries the entry

Article L123-36 of the commercial code establishes a national register of businesses. The text states that businesses carrying on a commercial, craft, agricultural or independent activity on French territory are entered in it.

Gateway and register are not the same thing, and conflating them makes you miss the point. The gateway is a channel: it receives a filing. The register is a state: it carries an entry. A formality filed is not a registration obtained.

This distinction explains how a file can be complete while the registration is still pending. The filing travels to the bodies concerned and to the authority that validates the entry; the gateway does not prejudge what they will decide.

Three families of formalities, every business

The gateway covers three families: creation, change and cessation. Many founders remember only the first and discover the second at their first change of address or activity, when it has to be declared in the same way.

The scope is general. The public service page states it without reservation: the gateway concerns every business, whatever its legal form or its activity. A micro-business and a public limited company go through the same door.

That generality has a useful flip side. The documents required do depend on the legal form and the activity: the door is shared, the file is not. The third module starts from exactly that difference.

Nor is the filing reserved to the director. The director, a delegate or an agent may all submit it and follow its progress from a personal dashboard, which makes assistance possible without taking the declaration out of the business's hands.

• Creation: the initial declaration of activity, whatever the legal form.
• Change: any modification affecting the declared situation of the business.
• Cessation: the end of the activity and the removal from the register that follows.
• Filing is done online, at procedures.inpi.fr, no longer at a local centre.
• The director, a delegate or an agent may carry out the step and track its progress.