Why form a South Dakota LLC?
There are many advantages to forming a South Dakota limited liability company for your business. First and foremost is the liability protection of your personal assets. When you form a LLC, it helps separate your personal assets from that of your business.
Naming tips for your LLC
A Limited Liability Company name in South Dakota must include Limited Liability Company, Limited Company or an abbreviation, such as LLC, L.L.C., Ltd Co, Limited, LC, and L.C. A South Dakota Limited Liability Company may not have the same name as an existing Corporation or Limited Partnership. The name of the LLC must be distinguishable upon the records of the Secretary of State. To determine distinction, the Secretary of State will ignore certain words and articles such as “an”, “the” “a”, etc… The Secretary of State will also ignore the use of capitalization, punctuation, spaces, plural forms of words or special characters.
Registered Agent
A requirement for all LLC's formed in the state is that you elect a registered agent for the company. A registered agent is mandatory for the LLC. The requirements of the agent is that he or she must be an individual who is over 18 and have a physical address in the state of South Dakota.
If you are filing a South Dakota LLC from another state, you will still need an agent in South Dakota. You can't use an address outside of South Dakota. If you do not have an individual who can serve as the agent in South Dakota, there are third party services that can provide the address for you. The fee for this service is $125 per year.
Amendments
The state recognizes that many companies will have some information that will change over time. Therefore they make arrangement to make these changes easily. To make changes, you must file Articles of Amendment with the state. The state allows you to change much of the information that was submitted when the initial articles were submitted. The only information that can't be changed is the organizer of the LLC. Everything else from the name of the LLC, name of the registered agent, and addresses can be changed. Typically there are fees associated with making any changes. One thing to note is that the state will not issue you a new set of Articles of Organization. They will just simply approve the articles of amendment. Therefore you must keep both documents on hand.
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