Setting up a company in Canada as a non-resident

Note: a lot of this is relevant to setting up any kind of corporation in Canada. See Startup for more like this

I was asked:

have you come across any entrepreneur-friendly turnkey upstart-administrartor-as-a-service that does it all (similar to Stripe Atlas, Gust, Clerky (registration, virtual address/mailbox scanning, bank account opening, tax filings, proxy directors, renewals) --- or do you still have to cobble together piecemeal clerks and law firms?

There is no turn-key service.

Ownr https://www.ownr.co/ is relatively new, from RBC Ventures. Haven’t used it myself, but looks like it can be done pretty simply.

There are no virtual address / mailbox things in Canada that are usable / price effective. Just searching this again to see if anything changed, and it turns out one of the providers is just up the street from me https://www.esnail.ca/box.html/

You can’t open a bank account anywhere in Canada without being physically present with the major banks. You might be able to open a KOHO https://koho.ca or Tangerine https://tangerine.ca (got started by ING, now owned by Scotiabank).

However, TransferWise https://transferwise.com might fill the gap of not having a Canadian bank account at all for now.

The list of Canadian banks that more directly integrate with TransferWise is probably a good starting point for “innovative” forward looking banks.

• Direct debit (personal accounts only) - https://transferwise.com/help/14/currencies/2955293/canadian-dollars-direct-debit
• Register as online bill payment, which should work with business accounts too https://transferwise.com/help/15/paying-for-your-transfer/2877011/adding-transferwise-for-online-bill-payments-in-canada

My friend Mike runs Sprout Accounting https://sproutaccounting.ca and I use him personally, for all my businesses, and recommend him to startups generally.

I would recommend Xero https://xero.com for your accounting since you’ll need to deal with multi-currency, and just do your own basic book keeping.

Get some setup consulting from Sprout, and then have them do your corporate taxes at year end.

For a consulting oriented corporation (i.e. you’re not a startup who is going to take in outside investors) you really won’t need much for ongoing legal work. As needed, I use Samuel Osei https://soseilaw.com/ for my personal corporation, and he’s been good. For more “startup law”, I have people I can recommend at Osler and LaBarge Weinstein.

A “regular” corporation is going to be the easiest. In Canada, BC doesn’t have a residency requirement for Directors. We’re the closest to the “Delaware” of Canada. There are no LLC-like structures in Canada.