A business address is the official location of a company's premises. It could be anything from someone's home address right up to a multi-million-pound campus, such as those big tech companies favour and everything in between.
If you run a company, then yes, you will need an official address that you do business from, this is sometimes called a trading address, correspondence address or Registered Office Address if your company is incorporated.
As your business grows or changes, so too can the address people use to find you. You could, for instance, start off by using your home address as the location for your company but as you grow, change that for an office, or even a "virtual" business address such as those we provide.
By law, all businesses must include their address on their stationery, such as invoices and letterheads, so deciding where your business will be located will often be one of the first decisions you make. You'll also need a business address for things like your website, social media pages and local business directories. Almost always, when you sign up to something as a business, you will be asked what your official address is, so it is pretty much essential to the operation of any business.
Yes, you can use your home address as your business address, it's a low-cost way of getting started but does come with some risks. As mentioned, the address you choose will be used on everything from your website to your letters. Effectively it will be public and easy to find online. You need to think about whether having your home address out there in the public domain is a good idea. For instance, would you like a disgruntled employee or customer turning up at the family home? Using your home address also makes it pretty clear you are a small business, which may be fine for a lot of people, but if you are working with more substantial companies or on high paying contracts, you'll likely want to present a more professional image.
A business address or it's trading address doesn't have to be its Registered Office Address. In fact, many businesses have a trading location and a different Registered Office Address. There are many reasons you may do this, but a significant one is to maintain some privacy at home for small businesses. In times gone by, many small businesses would make their registered office address their accountants address. This ensured that all critical paperwork would be sent to a formal address, without it needing to be the business owner's home address.
As we've explained, you may not always want to use your home address as your company's, or you might not even have physical premises in the UK but still require an address for your business. That's where we come in. UK Postbox provides Business Addresses which you can rent every month, these are strictly mailing addresses only, you can't visit the locations, but you can use them for all manner of things. A few examples are:
When letters are received, we scan and upload them to your secure UK Postbox login where you can then read and action letters just as you would email. You can access your UK business mail from anywhere in the world, from a desktop, laptop, tablet or phone. You have flexibility over your mail and can even have us forward the physical letters to you.
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A registered office, or registered office address, is the official location of a company in England and Wales; the address provided to Companies House.
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