Starting an education consultancy in Nepal: the registrations, in order

Most people start an education consultancy in the wrong order. They find the office, print the board, and then discover that the permission they need takes longer than the lease they just signed. The paperwork is not difficult. It is sequential, and doing it out of sequence is what costs the first intake.

Here is the order that works, and what each step actually asks for.

1. Decide the shape of the company first

You are choosing between a private limited company and a sole proprietorship, and the answer is almost always private limited. Not for tax reasons. Because a university signing a representation agreement is signing with an entity, and a sole proprietorship makes that entity you personally. When a partner joins, when a branch opens, when a bank asks who owns the commission account, the private limited structure answers the question and the other one does not.

Register at the Office of the Company Registrar. You will need the proposed name, the memorandum and articles, citizenship documents for each shareholder, and the registered address.

Name availability is where the first week goes. Names that include "education", "consultancy", "abroad study" and the obvious combinations of them are heavily taken. Have three names ready, in order of preference, before you start rather than after you are rejected.

2. PAN, and then VAT if you cross the threshold

Register for a PAN at the Inland Revenue Department immediately after company registration. It is quick and everything downstream depends on it, including the bank account.

VAT registration is threshold based. Watch the threshold rather than assuming you are below it, because commission income from several universities adds up faster than counselling fees do, and registering late is more expensive than registering early.

3. The Ministry of Education permission

This is the one that matters and the one people underestimate. A registered company is not an education consultancy until the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology says it is.

What the submission generally turns on:

• The premises. A real office, with a lease in the company's name, that a person could visit. Not a desk in someone else's consultancy.
• The people. Academic qualifications for whoever is named as running it. Keep the originals to hand; you will be asked more than once.
• The company documents. Registration certificate, PAN, memorandum and articles, tax clearance where applicable.
• Consistency. See the FAQ above. This is the single largest cause of a file coming back.

Build the file as though someone hostile will read it looking for a contradiction, because someone careful will.

4. The bank account, and the foreign exchange question

Open the company account once you have the registration and PAN. Then have a separate conversation with the bank about how commission from abroad will arrive, because that is a foreign exchange matter and not every branch handles it every day. Ask before your first commission is due, not after it has been sitting in a correspondent bank for three weeks.

Students' tuition remittance is a different matter again, governed by Nepal Rastra Bank rules and tied to the student's No Objection Certificate. Your students will ask you about it, so know the answer.

5. Only now, the office and the board

The lease, the fit out, the signage, the desks. Doing this last feels backwards and is not. Every month of rent before you can legally counsel a student is a month you are paying for a waiting room.

What nobody tells you about month one

You will have permission and no universities. The permission lets you operate; a representation agreement is what lets you actually place a student and be paid for it. Those agreements take their own time and have their own requirements, and the sensible move is to start those conversations while the Ministry file is in progress rather than after it clears.

The second thing: your first ten students will come from people who already know you. Not from the board outside. Plan for that, because the marketing budget you were going to spend in month one is better spent in month six when you have outcomes to point at.

The part that decides whether you are still here in three years

Registration is a week of effort and then it is done. What is not done is the thing that actually kills consultancies, which is losing track of students who were already interested.

An enquiry that came in on Sunday, was promised a call back on Tuesday, and got one three weeks later is not a lost enquiry because of competition. It is lost because nobody wrote it down in a place that would chase it. In an office of one, memory is sufficient. At around thirty active files, it stops being sufficient, and the failure is invisible: nothing breaks, the office just quietly converts fewer of the people who already walked through the door.

Decide early where a student's file lives. A shared drive of folders works until two people edit the same sheet. After that, you want one place where every enquiry, document, follow up and deadline sits, and where nothing depends on a particular person remembering.