Creating a company manually

Entering a company by hand — the longest of the three routes, and the only one that works for a non-French company or a newco not yet registered.

Overview

Manual entry is the longest of the three routes, and the one to use when the other two cannot apply.

Five steps, two of which are skippable — which matters, because an incomplete picture should not stop you creating the company and getting on with the project.

What you'll learn

The three cases where manual entry is the only route that works
The five steps, and which two you can skip
What legal representatives are, and when to leave them out
Why the cap table is empty afterwards, and why that is correct

Before you start

You will need the company's name and a category, plus whatever legal registration details you have. Everything beyond that can be completed later.

When manual entry is the right choice

A non-French company. INPI holds the French registry only. A Luxembourg or UK entity is entered by hand, with the registration country set so the fields become their generic equivalents. This is a supported case, not a workaround.

A newly formed company not yet registered. A newco inserted into a structure will not be in any registry yet.

A company you have partial information about. Record what you know and complete the rest later.

The five steps

Step	What it asks	Optional?
Company Basics	Name and category	Required
Contact Person	Main point of contact	Skippable
Legal Information	Registration country, legal name, legal form, SIREN or registration number, RCS or registration city	Required
Legal Representatives	The company's officers and directors	Skippable
Share Information	The company's share structure	—

Set the registration country first on the Legal Information step. For a French company you get SIREN and RCS city; for anything else, a registration number and a registration city.

Legal representatives

Legal representatives are individuals authorised to act on behalf of the company — typically executives, directors and officers listed in its official documents. Each carries a type, name, nationality and role.

This is the same concept that appears in legal-entity KYC, where an entity acts through its representative, and in signature setup, where an entity signs through a person.

If the company has not been registered yet, skip it. Recording a director who is not yet appointed is worse than recording none.

Read back what you typed

The other two routes end with "check what the platform retrieved", because they derive the legal details without showing them to you. Manual entry is the one route where you are the source, so there is nothing to check against a lookup.

The consequence is the same, though. The legal name and registration details feed generated documents, so a typo here becomes a typo on legal paper. Read back the legal name and the registration number before you finish.

Common problems

You are typing a French company's details from a term sheet. Stop and use the SIREN route. The registry is more reliable than the term sheet, and it is less work.

The SIREN field will not accept your number. Nine characters for a French company. For a non-French one, set the registration country and use the registration number field.

You do not know the directors. Skip the step.

You have created the company but the cap table is empty. Expected. Creating a company records that it exists, not who owns it. Recording the ownership history is separate work — and manual entry is the route most often used for companies that already have a history.