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Missed our last feature article? What Your New LLC Still Needs

Most owners don’t miss a filing because they’re careless. They miss it because the information lives in ten different places. Your annual report is on your state’s site. Your franchise tax is on another page. Your federal return date depends on how your LLC is taxed. Payroll deadlines sit with the IRS, sales tax with your state revenue department, and the governance items, the operating agreement review, the records you’re supposed to keep, aren’t written down anywhere at all. No single one of these is hard. Keeping track of all of them, scattered the way they are, is where good businesses slip. And if you own more than one LLC, or do business in more than one state, you are tracking all of this several times over for each entity.

Search the internet for a compliance calendar and you’ll find plenty. The problem is that almost none of them pull the whole picture together. Most of the tools track one thing, like your state’s annual report, and they exist mainly to sell you a registered agent service. The detailed federal tax calendars come from accounting firms and stop at the IRS forms. The good entity-tracking software is built for law firms managing hundreds of companies, not for one owner with one or two. So, you end up doing the job the tools were supposed to do for you, stitching three or four sources into something that fits your actual business. Free or paid, what’s out there is fragmented. Pulling it into one place is important.

Here is what a complete picture includes. Most owners are surprised by how much of it they have never written down.

Your state filings. Each state wants something yearly to keep your LLC active, and the rules are not uniform. Some tie the deadline to a fixed date, some to your formation anniversary. Florida wants an annual report by May 1. Texas wants a Public Information Report by May 15 even when you owe no franchise tax. Delaware charges a flat $300 tax on June 1. Wyoming and Nevada both key off your anniversary month. You also keep a registered agent current in each state where you are registered, and if you operate outside your formation state, you maintain that foreign registration too. Hold two or three LLCs in different states and these dates rarely line up, which is exactly why they belong on one page instead of in your head.

Federal income tax. Which return you file, and when, depends on how your LLC is taxed. A single member LLC reports on Schedule C with your April return. Partnership and S corporation returns come earlier, on the fifteenth day of the third month. A C corporation files in the fourth month. If you pay estimated taxes, those land four times a year. It is easy to assume April is the only date that matters. For a lot of owners, it isn’t.

Payroll and contractor filings. The moment you have employees, you are on a deposit schedule the IRS assigns you, plus a quarterly Form 941 and a year-end stack of W-2s. Pay contractors and you owe them and the IRS a 1099-NEC in January. State withholding and unemployment ride alongside, on their own dates.

Sales tax. If you sell taxable goods or services, your state assigns you a filing frequency, monthly, quarterly, or annual, based on your volume, and the due date depends on the state. You file even in a period with no sales, and the penalty for missing often applies whether or not you owed a dollar.

LLC governance and records. This is the part no online tracker includes, and the part that protects you. Reviewing your operating agreement once a year. Writing down the decisions you made. Keeping business and personal money separate. Telling the IRS within 60 days if your responsible party changes. These have no portal and no due date, which is why they get skipped, and why they surface at the worst moment, when a bank, a buyer, or a court asks you to prove your LLC is real and defensible.

Start from ours instead of a blank page.

We built the compliance calendar described here so you don’t have to start from scratch. It pulls all of it, state filings, federal taxes, payroll, sales tax, and the governance items, into one document, with the rules and 2026 examples already filled in and a reference tab for five common states. It is one of over thirty professionally prepared templates in The Co. Letter Premium.

The exercise is more important than the format. Set aside some time, open one document, and go obligation by obligation. For each one, decide whether it applies to you, write down your own due date, and note the fee. This forces you to confront the obligations you either have in your head or maybe didn’t know you had, while there is still time to handle them.

A few rules make it stick. You don’t have to calendar all of it, just what is important to your business. A single member LLC with no employees and no sales tax can ignore most of the payroll and sales sections, and that is the point, you keep what applies and delete the rest. If you own more than one LLC, give each its own copy or its own column, so one view still covers them all. For each deadline you keep, set two reminders, one 60 days out to confirm the fee and that the rule hasn’t changed, and one 30 days out as your signal to file. Then update your list as you file, and keep your confirmation numbers in the same place.

Do this once and the scattered information becomes one page you trust every year. It is the natural next step after What Your New LLC Still Needs, which walks you through the filings a new LLC owner faces. This is how you keep them from slipping a year later, and how you keep multiple entities straight instead of one.

The owners who never get the dissolution notice or the late penalty are not the ones with the best memory. They are the ones who wrote it all down once and set calendar reminders.

Remember to upgrade your free subscription to Premium, which gives you access to our growing Template Library of approximately thirty professionally prepared documents, including the compliance calendar from today’s article and different operating agreement templates, all for $7.95/mo. or $85.86/yr. You can upgrade by clicking here.

This Letter is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client or any other professional relationship. Filing requirements change and vary by state and situation, so confirm current rules with the relevant agency and consult a licensed professional in your jurisdiction before you act.

Have an interesting business question and need a free bit of advice? Send your question to [email protected]. No confidential info, please!