Bad news! ASIC are doing away with trading names and from 1st November 2018 they’ll disappear on their registers. The powers that be will now only recognise Business Names. If you currently use a trading name, and haven’t yet registered it as a Business Name with ASIC, then you have until the 31st October 2018 to do so.
The only circumstance under which you won’t need to register a business name is if it’s your personal name, your company name, or for those in partnership the name of all the partners strung together. For the rest of us, yup, we need to!
The instructions for registering your business name are here.
When you have a look at the link, you’ll notice that you need to be registered for ASIC Connect’s online services. If you have an AUSKey, you can use that instead of the ‘Log In’ or ‘Sign up’ buttons. It’s quite easy to register the name(s) and the instructions for first timers to ASIC Connect are nice & clear. So off you go and have a shot! Give me a call if you run into troubles.
Having said that, I ran into troubles when I registered mine. I got an error message saying that a ‘null’ value had been entered. Do you think I could find it? Heavens no! So I clicked on Contact Us and General Enquiry and they were kind enough to get back to me the next day to help me solve the problem. I included a screen shot of the error message too, which probably helped them a lot.
Yes, there is a cost to register your business name! But it’s not high with the maximum (for a 3 year registration) being $84.00.
Just remember though that, in the words of the ASIC website:
“It is important to understand that registering your business name does not give you ownership over that name, nor does it provide you with any protection for your brand or trading name. This means that registering a particular name does not stop another person from registering a similar name nor will it give you the exclusive right to use the name or part of the name.
The obligation to register a business name is a legal obligation that is entirely separate to any steps that business owners may want to take to protect any intellectual property in a name or brand.”
