Corporation S CorpOnly two papers settle it

A company file collects organizers, bank portals, payroll logins, and prior returns. Most of that pile is useful later. Two papers settle the status. The state certificate says what was formed and when. The IRS acceptance says the S election was received and accepted, if that is the life you are claiming.

Articles people printed from a template, a screenshot of a dropdown, and a prior year return that assumed a status are clues. They are not the pair. We read the clues so we know what the last person believed. We do not let a clue outvote the certificate or the acceptance.

If the acceptance uses a name that does not match the certificate, we stop and reconcile the name before any account is recoded. A spelling drift between the state and the IRS is a common quiet error. It is fixed with documents, not with a guess in the software.

It proves the IRS accepted an election for the year it names. It does not prove that every later year stayed eligible. A second class of stock, a disqualified owner, or a revocation can end the story while the old acceptance is still in the drawer. We ask what changed after the date on the paper.

It also does not set the wage. Reasonable compensation is a separate judgment once the status is real. The paper gets you into that conversation. It does not finish it. The wage figure itself is still produced by the payroll service you operate. We do not run payday.

Late elections that were cured under Revenue Procedure 2013-30 should have their own correspondence. If someone remembers that a late filing was fixed, we ask for that correspondence. Memory of a phone call is not the paper.

The certificate's date tells us when the company began. The acceptance's effective year tells us when S rules begin. Months before that year are not S months, even if the menu was switched early. We do not recode history to flatter the election.

Equity accounts get named for the status that applies. A C year does not keep a shareholder distribution account that implies a K-1. An S year does not leave owner wages inside a draw account. Basis is scheduled off to the side, in words and in numbers that belong to you, never as a public example with a dollar result.

Then the month can close. Reconciliations, a balance sheet, and a short note of what changed are the product. The return uses that close. A pile of unreconciled months is not made true by a beautiful acceptance.

We will not draft a fake acceptance to calm a lender. We will not tell a lender you are an S company because the software says so. Signed assurance is a different profession. When a contract names an audit, a review, or a compilation, we point at the disclosures page and we stop.

We will not invent a filing fee, a built in gains rate, or a beneficial ownership rule on this page. A state's formation fee belongs on that state's own instructions, and we do not print a number here that we did not copy from the office that charges it. Federal timing stays in the words of the Form 2553 window, not a single March slogan.

Bring the pair, or name the one you do not have. Everything besides those two can stay in the drawer until work is scoped.

A folder earns its weight from the paper stored inside it, not from the words printed on the tab. The dropdown is that tab. The acceptance is the page that has to hold weight. We keep the heavy paper in the file and we treat the tab as a nickname until the letter agrees.