Founding Date, Fiscal Year, and the Post-Registration Checklist — Overview

The company's founding date (設立日) is the date the application is accepted by the Legal Affairs Bureau. The fiscal year can be set arbitrarily and changed later. After registration there is a strict checklist of notices to the tax office, local authorities, and the pension fund. Separately, this record covers the rules for changing a director's salary and accounting for expenses incurred before the company was registered. The founding date (設立日) is the date the application is accepted at the Legal Affairs Bureau, not the date the teikan was notarized. Processing time after filing ranges from a few days (2-4) to about a week, depending on the bureau's workload (for example, about a week in Yokohama). The fiscal year can be set arbitrarily (not necessarily April-March) and changed repeatedly afterward; the annual return is filed within 2 months of the fiscal year-end. The fiscal year-end date (決算日) is usually set to the last day of the month before the registration month — standard practice to maximize the deferral of the first reporting period. A common choice is a fiscal year starting April 1 (matching Japan's government budget year), though January 1 (a plus for syncing with overseas clients, a minus for coinciding with the personal tax period and doubling up filings) and October 1 (based on reporting convenience and client cycles) are also used. One experienced chat participant (20 years in business) prefers starting the fiscal year in December, since it coincides with 年末調整 (the year-end adjustment of employee taxes), simplifying bookkeeping by avoiding intense work three times a year. Registering a company shortly (say, a couple of weeks) before the start of a fiscal year can "save" an entire year of paperwork by pushing the first reporting period out to the following year. Corporate income tax (法人税) generally requires an interim return (中間申告書) filed within 2 months after 6 months have passed since the start of the fiscal year, plus a final return (確定申告書) filed within 2 months after the fiscal year ends, along with an interim tax payment. According to one participant's research, this interim-return rule does NOT apply to a company in its first year of existence, since it has no base period (基準期間) to calculate from. The post-registration checklist: 1) within 2 months, file with the tax office — the Company Establishment Notice plus the blue-form application (青色申告承認申請書, important not to miss); 2) file with local authorities — the prefectural tax office (Company Establishment Notice) and the city/ward office (Company Establishment Notice, usually a ~15-day deadline, not required for companies headquartered in Tokyo's 23 wards since the Metropolitan Tax Office covers both prefectural and municipal corporate taxes there); 3) open a 給与支払事務所 (payroll office) within 1 month of starting to pay salaries, required even for a single director drawing officer remuneration; 4) file an application to change the frequency of income-tax withholding payments (from monthly to twice-yearly, for employers with fewer than 10 salaried people; deemed approved by month-end following submission, effective 2 months after filing); 5) when the first employee is hired, mandatory registration with the pension system (年金) as an employer within 5 days of starting to pay remuneration — impossible if officer remuneration is 0 yen, since there's no basis for premium calculation, in which case the director stays on National Health Insurance and National Pension personally; 6) the mandatory 算定基礎届 form (filed even with no salary changes); 7) notification of whether an employee bonus was paid, via e-Gov within 5 days of payment; 8) a Pre-determined Officer Remuneration Report, needed only to make non-regular officer bonuses tax-deductible, due within 2 months of incorporation for new companies (or within 1 month of a shareholders' resolution / 4 months from fiscal year start for existing ones) — paying a different amount or date than reported makes the whole bonus non-deductible. If hiring actual employees (not just directors), two more filings apply that a director-only company can skip entirely: a Labor Insurance Establishment Notification within 10 days of hiring the first employee at the Labor Standards Inspection Office, and an Employment Insurance Office Establishment notice within 10 days at Hello Work (together with the Employment Insurance Insured Person Qualification Acquisition Notification, and a copy of the Labor Insurance Establishment Notification). An Estimated Labor Insurance Premium Declaration, based on projected annual wages, is then due within 50 days of the insurance relationship being established, and gets settled at year-end through the final premium declaration. Beyond the notification checklist, a handful of setup items are worth doing early or in parallel. A My Number Card takes about a month to issue and underpins nearly every electronic procedure (e-Tax, eLTax, GBizID), so it's best obtained before incorporating; it carries two certificates — a digital signature certificate (6-16 characters) and a user authentication certificate (a 4-digit PIN). Using it electronically requires an IC card reader (Sony's PaSoRi RC-S300, about 3,500 yen, is a common recommendation; Micro-B USB, no driver needed on macOS 13+, though MacBooks need a USB-C adapter) plus the JPKI User Software and its browser extension. A seal registration card (印鑑カード), obtained at the Legal Affairs Bureau, is needed to get seal certificates for opening a bank account. A company domain, website, and an email address on that domain are commonly requested as proof of business activity for bank account, DUNS number, and similar applications. GBizID is a free Digital Agency single sign-on covering 100+ government services; applying with a My Number Card and smartphone usually gets it issued in 1-2 business days, and it's worth setting up right after the Corporate Number arrives and before starting insurance filings. e-Gov is the portal for online social and labor insurance filings, logged into via GBizID or the My Number Card. The Corporate Number itself (法人番号, 13 digits) is auto-assigned by the NTA within days of registration, no application needed, and gets entered on most notification forms. An electronic certificate for commercial registration (商業登記電子証明書) from the Legal Affairs Bureau is optional — the My Number Card substitutes for it in most procedures, and its application software is Windows-only anyway. A DUNS number, also optional, is issued for free through Apple by Tokyo Shoko Research and is required for things like Apple Developer, Microsoft for Startups, AWS Activate, and Google for Startups. Changing a director's salary (賃金) always requires minutes of a shareholders'/board meeting. If the salary changes by more than 2 tiers on the social-insurance scale, the pension fund must be notified within about 3 months; below that, meeting minutes alone are enough with no further notice. A director cannot arbitrarily raise their own salary — there are strict compensation limits, which matter for both audits and immigration trust. In one case a gyosei-shoshi drew up a backdated "meeting minutes" document for a sole director shortly after registration, to formally legitimize setting their own salary; the same procedure repeats for any raise. A director can officially draw a salary of 0 yen, which reduces bureaucratic overhead (no full employment relationship, no HR overhead); a company with no employees can skip enrolling in corporate social insurance (社会保険) if the representative director's salary is 0. A director personally covers the earliest registration expenses (office, furniture, equipment), which are then booked as company expenses: costs incurred before incorporation (lawyer fees, filing fees, office deposits, equipment) can be recorded as company expenses in the first fiscal year, tracked as "credits to the director" (a company debt to the director, 創立費の立替払い) — this is a right, not an obligation, and the director can choose not to reimburse themselves in order to strategically lower company profit/loss. There is no strict formal repayment deadline, but blog advice from freee and Yayoi suggests repaying within six months, or it may be treated as an interest-bearing loan. Personal equipment such as monitors bought before incorporation and then transferred to the company can potentially be booked as an expense, but there is a risk of it being disallowed without receipts — best to check with an accountant.