Yes, you need one. No loopholes here. When you incorporate a company in Singapore, it is not an option to leave a corporate secretary. The legislation allows you six months upon incorporation and thereafter you should be able to sort it out.
It is a bit of a formality. Another title to fill. There is more to the position than meets the eye. Get the facts about this topic!
Compliance is dealt with by a corporate secretary. It is a term used frequently, and in reality merely involves ensuring that your company keeps in line with filing dates, the statutory registers and that any change of company, such as a new director, or other shareholder, gets duly noted. Miss anything little, and it is not long until it is big.
I have observed founders disregard this at the very beginning believing that they will address this at a later time when the business starts to pick up. Then time runs out, fines are levied and in a moment it is an emergency. Singapore does not really do subtle reminders. It anticipates that you be aware of your duties.
The legal legal requirement is not complicated. The secretary should be a Singapore resident. It might be a person or a company offering company services. When there is a sole director in your company, he or she cannot be the secretary. People are more likely to be caught by that rule than you might have guessed.
The standard path is through outsourcing. This is not done by employing somebody in-house by most small businesses. They rather collaborate with companies that package secretary services into yearly packages. It is feasible, and tends to be cheap as compared to employing workers. It depends on the prices, but it is usually some hundreds of dollars annually.
Responsiveness is of greater importance than cost. You will soon feel it when your secretary takes days to respond or provides imprecise responses. You may miss filings merely due to a breakdown in communication. That is annoying, particularly when the entire essence of the job is to ensure that things are smoothly going on in the background.
There is one little advantage of which people do not speak enough. An effective corporate secretary does not simply file documents, he points out problems at the outset. Perhaps your share structure should be revised, or a resolution should be made prior to decision. They detect such things before they become issues.
The corporate secretary in Singapore serves as a sort of an intermediary between you and the regulators as well. You do not work out each detail. They will break down requirements into something you can actually do something about, which will save time and confuse less.
It is not the best part of running a business. Nobody begins a business with secretarial responsibilities in mind. However, don’t dwell on it, or at least do it sparingly, and it turns out to be one of those silent causes of stress that just keeps on resurfacing at the worst possible moment.