Guide · Back office
Replace your vendor stack. What ten vendors cost you, and the order to consolidate them in.
Most founders running a US company from abroad end up with eight to ten vendors and no single place their company's state actually lives. Consolidating works, but only in the right order: registered agent and compliance calendar first, cancellations last.
Nobody chooses this. It accumulates.
Nobody chooses a ten-vendor stack. It accumulates, one urgent problem at a time, and each vendor solves its own slice and refuses the seams between them. The seams are where companies get dissolved.
Six questions, and you have your audit. Most founders cannot answer three.
| Ask yourself | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Who has your operating agreement? | If the answer is "I would have to check", that is the first gap. |
| Who renews your registered agent? | A lapsed renewal is how a state administratively dissolves a company. |
| Who has bank access? | Not just who can log in. Who can actually act if something needs to move quickly. |
| Who tracks your annual report? | "The registered agent" is the wrong answer more often than founders expect. |
| Who files your taxes, and who asked about Form 5472? | A bookkeeper is not a tax preparer, and a tax preparer does not always ask the foreign-ownership question. |
| What does each vendor cost you per year? | Add it up yourself. Most founders have never seen the total in one place. |
What it costs you. Not in fees. In seams.
Diligence stalls
Documents live in five places and nobody can produce the full set on request.
A bank review flags a mismatch
The address one vendor holds does not match the address another one filed.
A deadline falls through a seam
Between a registered agent who "just receives mail" and an accountant who "only does taxes".
You become the integration layer
Your own unpaid hours, spent reconciling what ten vendors will not reconcile for you.
The seam that costs the most is the annual filing nobody owned. A foreign-owned single-member LLC generally files every year, even with no profit.
What to centralise. And what to leave alone.
Worth consolidating
- →Formation records
- →Registered agent
- →Business address
- →Compliance calendar
- →Bookkeeping cadence
- →Tax coordination
- →Document storage
- →The operating view over all of it
Keep with a specialist
- →Litigation counsel
- →Complex cross-border tax strategy
- →Audit representation
- →A mature specialist tool that already works, until the switching cost is genuinely worth paying
A platform that offers to absorb the right-hand column is overreaching
The order is the advice. Cancel last, never first.
01 Audit first
A written status review before anything moves. You need to know exactly what exists before you touch it.
02 Registered agent
Transfer, confirmed in writing. This is the piece that secures state notices, so it moves first, not last.
03 Compliance calendar
Load every deadline before the next one arrives. This is what most fragmented stacks are missing entirely.
04 Documents
Collect the scattered record set into one place: operating agreement, EIN letter, filings, all of it.
05 Books
Catch up first, then set the cadence. A monthly rhythm cannot be built on top of a backlog.
06 Tax
Back-year filings where they are needed.
07 Cancel the redundant vendors
Last, never first. Nothing is cancelled until its replacement is confirmed live.
Questions founders ask. Answered in the open.
Is consolidating onto one platform risky?
The risk is in the order of operations, not in the consolidation. Move the registered agent and the compliance calendar first, cancel the old vendors last, and nothing falls through. That is why a migration starts with a written status review rather than a signup.
Will one platform really match specialist tools?
In some categories a specialist goes deeper, and a credible platform says so rather than claiming otherwise. Consolidation does not win by out-featuring every specialist. It wins on coordination: one source of truth, one cadence, one place your bank, your investor or the IRS can be answered from.
What does consolidation actually save?
We publish no savings figure, because we have not measured your stack and neither has anyone else quoting one. Add your own vendors up, then compare. Prolify's entry plan is $397, first year + state fees.
What should I never move?
Litigation counsel, complex cross-border tax strategy and audit representation. Those are specialist relationships, and a platform that offers to absorb them is overreaching.
Start with the audit, not the signup. You cannot move what you have not found.
Every Prolify migration begins with a written status review of what exists, where it lives and what is missing. Nothing is cancelled until its replacement is confirmed live.