What documents and records does a startup need from day one? Most guides hand you a checklist and stop there.
Register the company with ASIC. Get an ABN. Sort a constitution and a shareholders agreement. Assign the founders' IP to the company. Sign proper customer contracts.
All needed. But all they prove is that you exist.
What the law already asks for
Australian companies have record-keeping duties from the start. Under section 286 of the Corporations Act, a company must keep financial records that correctly record and explain its transactions, and keep them for 7 years. The ATO says you need to keep most tax records for 5 years.
Then there's section 251A. A company must record the proceedings and resolutions of directors' and members' meetings in its minute books within one month.
Read that one again. The law already expects you to write decisions down as they happen, not later.
Existing isn't the same as credible
When I was the one asking the questions, the incorporation papers took a minute to check. The real conversation was about what happened next. Why this market? Who's paying, and how do you know they're happy? Do the numbers in the deck match the books? That's where trust gets won or lost.
The founders with a record could just show me. The rest had to rebuild it from inboxes and memory. And rebuilt history always looks a bit rebuilt.
What to keep from day one
On top of the paperwork, here's what I'd keep, as it happens:
- Decisions: what you decided, who decided and why. Pricing, hires, pivots, the lot.
- Customer evidence: calls, feedback, orders, complaints and churn, dated and in their words.
- Numbers: revenue, burn, runway and the few metrics you run on, updated monthly with the assumptions behind them.
- Ownership changes: every share issue or transfer, logged when it happens and matching the paperwork.
None of it is hard on the day. It's very hard to recreate two years later.
Start the record now
Ethiks360 is a place to keep those records from week one, so when an investor, a buyer or your accountant asks, you show what happened instead of reconstructing it.
The documents prove you exist. The records show you're worth backing.
Today, write down the last three decisions you made, why you made them and the date.
82/18: machines did the boring bit. The thinking's mine.