Procedures in setting up clinic. Part 1

After years of study in acupuncture school, the main focus is to be a licensed acupuncturist. However after an ecstatic experience of passing all the NCCAOM exams and jurisprudence exams getting licensed, things suddenly come to an abrupt stop. How to get my clinic started? This is not taught in school, hopefully through this blog, I can shared my limited knowledge of setting up a clinic to those who are still in the process of wadding through this muddy water.

First and foremost, you need to decide what is the name of the company. The name needs to be unique and distinguishable. Have said that, this is not an easy task given that virtually every name or words under the sun has been used by some company, thus try creating a name that do not exist to make the company name unique. The company name like Kodak, Google, Facebook are all unique and can be trademark and will not infringe on someone else name, with an added bonus, it will be list top on Google search engine effortlessly. For example if I were to search for healing rock acupuncture, the name healing rock is unique enough for my main homepage to be place as the first search result. If I were to use phoenix as my clinic name, and search for phoenix acupuncture, the first few pages of the search result would not be my homepage.

After searching for a unique name, the next step is to register the company with the State. In my case would be Texas Secretary of State. There will be a bunch of forms to pick from. For most of us, it would fall into the category of LLC, Limited Liability Corporation. However, because we are setting up an acupuncturist clinic, there is a subcategory we should apply, known as the PLLC. In short means that it is a limited liability company organized for the purpose of providing professional services. Usually, professions where the state requires a license to provide services, such as a doctor, chiropractor, lawyer, accountant, architect, landscape architect, or engineer, require the formation of a PLLC. However, some states, such as California, do not permit LLCs to engage in the practice of a licensed profession. Exact requirements of PLLCs vary from state to state. Typically, a PLLC's members must all be professionals practicing the same profession. Therefore, the form we choose would be Form 206, follow the instructions.

After submitting Form 206, you should start to apply for an EIN number for the government to tax on the company. At the IRS websites, there will be tons of instructions telling us what to do but the most important thing is to apply the EIN number here. Before application, you would need to talk to a certified accountant to determine the company should be filed as a Sole Proprietor, Partner, C-Corp or S-Corp. The easiest path would be Sole Proprietor/Disregarded Entities. After these 2 forms are submitted, time to settle down for a sip of coffee and wait for reply from both institutions.

After receiving a reply from the two institution, you need to put two date in your yearly calender, March 15 for filing of the tax report to IRS; May 15 for filing Texas franchise tax report to Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts.