Your Indian entity, structured and incorporated correctly the first time
An Indian entity is the foundation everything else stands on: your hiring, your compliance obligations, your tax position, your ability to repatriate profits cleanly. Set it up correctly and you never think about it again. Set it up wrong and you pay for it every year, in restructuring costs, tax inefficiency, and filings that fix yesterday's shortcuts.
We design and build that foundation for international companies establishing Global Capability Centres, and we publish our process on this page, because a firm that has done this many times has nothing to hide about how.
What the service covers
Seven workstreams, one accountable team
Entity structuring and incorporation.
We design the structure with your global tax position and long-term plans in mind, then incorporate your Indian company and complete every filing it needs to exist. You get an entity built for where you are going, not just where you are starting.
Regulatory compliance setup.
A foreign-owned Indian entity carries registrations and reporting obligations from its first day, including the reporting of your investment itself. We put every registration in place and build the compliance framework before it is needed, so no obligation is discovered after its deadline.
Talent acquisition.
Hiring can begin while incorporation is in process, not after it. We run recruitment against your role definitions and your bar, so the day your entity can legally employ, it has people ready to join.
Workspace acquisition.
We find, negotiate, and contract the right workspace in the city your talent strategy points to, whether that is Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, NCR, or beyond. You get space matched to your headcount plan, not a lease you outgrow or rattle around in.
IT asset procurement.
Laptops, licences, and infrastructure procured, configured, and ready on each employee's first day. Your people start working on day one, not waiting on deliveries.
Budgeting and financial modelling.
Before you commit, you see what the centre will actually cost: setup, people, space, and running costs, modelled honestly. Decisions get made on numbers, not estimates traded in meetings.
Processes and controls.
Approval hierarchies, payment controls, accounting policies, and reporting lines established from day one. A centre 8,000 kilometres away is only trustworthy if its controls are, and retrofitting controls after problems is the expensive way to learn that.
The path to incorporation, published
Our setup playbook, step by step
Most firms keep their process vague and call it expertise. We publish ours. This is the path we run for a foreign-owned private limited company, the structure most Global Capability Centres use.
- 01
Structure design
Entity type, shareholding, capitalisation, and director composition, decided against your group's tax position and plans. Every later step executes this design, which is why it comes first and why we do not skip it even for clients in a hurry.
- 02
Digital signatures and director identification
The individuals who will sign for your company obtain the digital signature certificates and director identification numbers Indian filings require. Administrative, but it gates everything after it, so we start it immediately.
- 03
Name reservation
Your company name checked, cleared, and reserved with the Registrar of Companies before anything is filed in it.
- 04
Incorporation filing
The incorporation application, charter documents, and associated registrations filed together. When approval comes back, your company legally exists, with its certificate of incorporation and core tax registrations in hand.
- 05
Bank account and capital
The company's Indian bank account opened, your initial capital remitted, and the foreign investment reported to the regulator within its statutory window. This reporting step is where unadvised setups most often slip; ours does not.
- 06
Operating registrations
The registrations your entity needs to actually operate and employ: goods and services tax where applicable, provident fund, state insurance, professional tax, and labour registrations for your workspace and state.
- 07
Controls, then people
Accounting systems, approval hierarchies, and payment controls switched on, payroll infrastructure ready, and the first employment contracts issued. The entity is now not just incorporated but operational.
Steps overlap wherever the rules allow: hiring groundwork, workspace search, and IT procurement run in parallel with the filings, so the calendar compresses. In your first consultation we map this path against your specifics and tell you plainly what is fast, what is fixed, and what depends on you.
The mistakes we exist to prevent
Where foreign-owned setups go wrong
The structure did not anticipate growth.
An entity structured only for month one becomes a tax and repatriation problem by year three. We structure for your five-year plan, because restructuring a live entity costs multiples of structuring it right.
A registration was missed, and we found out from a notice.
Foreign investment reporting, state-level labour registrations, and tax enrolments each have their own deadlines and their own penalties. Our checklist exists because we have run it many times; nothing on it waits to be discovered.
Everything happened in sequence, so it took twice as long.
Waiting for the certificate of incorporation before starting the workspace search or candidate pipeline wastes months. We parallelise everything regulation permits.
We had an entity but could not operate it.
Incorporated is not operational. Without bank access, controls, payroll infrastructure, and operating registrations, a certificate is just paper. Our definition of done is an entity that can employ, pay, and account for people, not one that merely exists.
FAQ
Common questions about setting up an entity in India
What entity type do most foreign companies use for a GCC?
Do we need an Indian resident director?
Can we start hiring before the entity exists?
What ongoing obligations does the entity create?
Can you work with our existing tax or legal advisors abroad?
Ready to talk about your centre in India?
Tell us where you are in your thinking. We respond within one business day and work across US, UK, and European time zones.