It’s now clear that Mr. LLC is a sep­a­rate per­son. Its cash is not your cash. Its assets are not your assets. If you mix Mr. LLC’s cash and assets with your per­sonal cash and assets, then Mr. LLC might not be treated as a sep­a­rate per­son. The same holds true with your other com­pa­nies. Here’s what you need to do to keep things separate.

Bank Accounts

Open a bank account in Mr. LLC’s name. If you con­tributed startup cash to Mr. LLC, then deposit this cash in the bank account. Use Mr. LLC’s account for busi­ness pur­poses only. Don’t take money from it for per­sonal use.

Trans­fer­ring Assets

If you con­tributed startup assets to Mr. LLC, trans­fer these assets to Mr. LLC via a bill of sale, deed, or what­ever other legal instru­ment is nec­es­sary to trans­fer the assets to Mr. LLC. Then use these assets for busi­ness pur­poses only.

Book­keep­ing

Open up sep­a­rate books for Mr. LLC and keep track of all its finances as a sep­a­rate entity. If you own other LLCs or com­pa­nies, those enti­ties must have their own books.

Con­tracts

Enter into con­tracts in the name of Mr. LLC. Here’s how you sign those contracts.

Your Com­pany Name, LLC By: [sig­na­ture of man­ager or member]

Man­ager [or Mem­ber if you’re member-managed]

Doing Busi­ness

Make it clear to your cus­tomers, sup­pli­ers, and oth­ers that they are doing busi­ness with Mr. LLC and not you per­son­ally. You should include the LLC part of your busi­ness name on things such as busi­ness cards, invoices, sta­tion­ary, etc. You can refer to the busi­ness as My LLC. Don’t use the term partner; use co-member instead.

Cap­i­tal­iza­tion

Keep Mr. LLC well fed. Make sure he has enough equity from its mem­bers (money, prop­erty, loans, assets, cash flow, and other finan­cial resources) to pay his debts when due.

LLC to LLC Relation

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Your LLC must treat your other LLCs and cor­po­ra­tions like strangers. If they pro­vide ser­vices to each other, they must have con­tracts between them with terms just like any other con­tract between strangers

Bien­nial Reports and Updates

You file a bien­nial report with the state of Alaska every two years to tell them and the pub­lic who owns and is in charge of your LLC. This infor­ma­tion is on the inter­net. If some­thing changes between bien­nial reports, you need to let Alaska know about the changes. You also need to get a busi­ness license and make sure it gets renewed.

Reg­is­tered Agent

If some­one wants to sue Mr. LLC, that per­son can’t say “hey Mr. LLC, I’m going to sue you.” So how do you talk to Mr. LLC? That’s where the reg­is­tered agent comes into play.

You des­ig­nate an offi­cial per­son or another cor­po­ra­tion to be Mr. LLC’s ears. This can be your attor­ney, a law firm, your­self, or a reg­is­tered agent company. They lis­ten to the peo­ple who need to talk with Mr. LLC about legal stuff such as sum­mons, com­plaints, and other legal notices. This is an impor­tant job because they will be the one to respond to the per­son talk­ing to Mr. LLC. If they ignore them, Mr. LLC could end up with a default judgment or some other legal action against it.