Two of the most frequent business structures in Australia are companies and trusts. Due to the various regulatory criteria and regulations that must be satisfied in order to operate these company structures, establishing and understanding how they work can be difficult.

First and foremost, you must decide whether your business will be registered as a private or public company, as this will affect the conditions you must complete in order to register. The registration process might be perplexing in both circumstances, especially if you have never done it before. Our lawyers at Nicholas James Lawyers have helped businesses with the incorporation process, and we encourage you to contact our team if you require advice on the different requirements for a proprietary and public company.

A trust, in comparison, is a legal partnership between a trustee and a beneficiary in which the trustee manages the trust’s assets for the benefit of the beneficiary. As a result, the trust will create a divide between the legal and beneficial interests, making trusts one of the more difficult corporate structures to administer and comprehend.

The main characteristics of a trust are:

• The trust itself cannot enter transactions which means the trustee must enter into all transactions on behalf of the trust, making the trustee the owner of the legal interest in the trust property