how to close my llc in california [Deep Research]

Last updated : Aug 19, 2022

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do you have an llc in california that you want to shut down is there a company you started that maybe it didn't work out and you want to get rid of it now because you don't want to continue to pay that 800 a year franchise tax fee to california well in this video i'm going to show you exactly how to dissolve an llc in california it only costs five dollars it's simpler than you think so let's just get started okay this is the website that you want to go to you can see that it is sos.ca.gov this is the california secretary of state website but first we need to figure out how to actually dissolve the llc what forms do we need how do we handle this and can we do it online the short answer is yes so let me show you the exact answer from the secretary of state if you look right here under how do i terminate or dissolve surrender or cancel my business you go down to limited liability company which is what we're focusing on today we're not focusing on nonprofits corporations or anything else we're focusing on domestic llcs or llcs that were opened up within california for california so you need to file a certificate of dissolution form llc 3 and a certificate of cancellation form llc 4-7 or 4-7 that sounds confusing as [ __ ] and i can totally understand why you would want to look up a youtube video to make sure you're doing it right well you found the right one so let's get started let me show you how easy this process really is and so there's an option online that allows us to submit the llc and llc 4-7 in one fell swoop so here's how it works we go back to the sos.ca.gov we're going to go to business and instead of searching for the business we are going to click on forms and fees for business entities oh look at that they have llc termination right here for you file online super easy so let's go ahead and click llc termination oh now we have to search we have to put in either the entity number or the name so i'm going to go ahead and put in slapstop we're going to search it and we found it the exact same entity number the exact same company i'm going to go ahead and click on that company name and so it says by checking this box i understand that this is the correct entity that i'm going to be modifying and that's correct so what we want to go what we want to do is we want to click on terminate this entity that's the next box that we're going to click after ensuring that it's the correct one all right now it's really important that you let everything load on these pages before you start clicking through it's a secretary of state website man come on it's the state they're not super good at tech so anyways we're gonna hit accept and we're going to see here that the certified copy fee is five bucks so it's going to cost five dollars for llc dash three four seven or four eight that's not too bad it's way better than 800 bucks a year for a corp or a company you're not using all right so we're going to select an option below we're going to dissolve or terminate in this case termination is correct for 99 of people dissolution um it can be used if you are instructed to do so by your attorney or a tax professional that you're working with but 99 of time we're just going to go with termination we want this company to be over with and done so we're going to go ahead and hit next now in this case there's only one member of this company but if there are more than one member in the llc everybody has to vote to dissolve the company in this case because it's only me the answer is yes now we get to the date section 99 of people are going to click current date unless you want to dissolve the llc in the future like in a couple months or whatever you can choose to do so but like i said 99 choose current date now we get over here to the uh the submission review and so we want to make sure this name is correct the entity number is correct we're going to terminate or cancel it we have our electronic signature we have verified that the information is correct we put in our email address and now we're going to hit next and boom we get to the credit card payment site and this is the last step this is the last step so i'm going to go ahead and put in my credit card number and then we're going to talk about the last thing that you have to do after this all right here we go this is the next stage that we get to so before we get into this let me just share one thing with you my name is evan and i started vanitar business school to teach business owners the foundational concepts of building their businesses we're talking about business plans forming your llc quarterly taxes how to handle write-offs how to pay yourself how to set up s-corporations how to deal with your taxes how to deal with sales tax all of that complicated [ __ ] that we wish you learned in school right now we're running a promo for black friday the code gratitude will get you 50 off head over to vanitar.com if you're interested in learning more about business from me i promise you will love the way that i teach all right back to it now this is the last page that we're going to get to and it's really important that we right click and we hit save as you can also right click and hit print and save as a pdf instead of printing it to your printer save it as a pdf that way we can save this page and we have proof that we've paid the secretary of state to dissolve our company once we have this document saved we're completely done your llc is going to be dissolved with california however if in the future you ever get sent to notice that you owe money off or any franchise tax board payments for having an llc in california you'll have this receipt that you just saved proving that you paid to dissolve your llc and that should help protect you in the event of mistakes made in the future i hope this video helped if you like learning from me check out vanitor.com otherwise keep educating and be good to future you

Thanks for your comment Marquis Gruntz, have a nice day.
- Weston Carli, Staff Member

hey this is attorney elizabeth potts weinstein and today we're going to talk about how to terminate your llc in california if you want to shut down your llc and stop being in business in california either because you moved to another state and set up a new llc there or because you never launched the business or you're no longer having this business you actually need to terminate it in california otherwise you're still going to get bills for the 800 a year franchise fee taxes and potentially someone could sue the llc i mean you want to close all that stuff up so how do you shut down your limited liability company in california well what you need to do is you need to file some documents to terminate it now how what docum how do you do that and what documents you file depends upon your exact situation so we're going to get into those details but before you file if you want to use the online filing system which is california's new biz file system as of 2022 you're going to need to set a few things up first and check a few things to do that online filing and also even if you're going to do old-fashioned pdf form that you print out and mail in filing there's some things you need to check on first so let's get into how to do that so the first thing that you're going to need to do is go to the biz file online system and check on your llc is it hooked up to your login account and is there any problem with it so when you go to biz file online if you're not already logged in you're going to see that there's forms that you can fill out and you may think oh i can file the termination form here and you will be wrong because there's no termination form here how it works is that you first have to be logged in and have your llc connected to your login account and then you can see the forms you can file for that llc the idea is they don't want some like random person determining somebody else's llc it actually is a good security practice however it can create some logistical problems so the first thing you're going to do is create a login you click on login if you don't already have a login you can hit the sign up button and you can create an account by just putting in your email password first name last name it's fairly fairly simple so let's assume that you have done that and you're logged in now the next part of this is getting your business connected to your login so let's say you don't have your business connected to your log i'm actually going to log out and there's no businesses because i don't have a login here what you're going to do is search for your business i'm going to put in my law firm which is a corporation but it's the same thing for doing an llc epw small business law and i click on that and it comes up down here over on the side it has a whole bunch of information which we're going to talk more about in a minute but at the very bottom if you scroll down it has request access this is where you're going to request access to your llc if you don't have access already there's a couple different ways to get access to your llc first is if you created your llc in the last month then you're going to automatically have access in this system second is if you created your llc using online filing in the last couple years under kind of the old online filing system you should have gotten an email to your email address to connect those up so you can create a login it'll already be in it'll already be in here it's really nice but let's say either somebody else created your llc or you created it using you know filing something in the mail a long time ago how do you connect it well let's look in the help folder to see how to do that if you click on help the online help is actually a pdf which is not the best help system but here we are and you scroll down to the outline for the help system and it has access to online business entity records if you click on that it'll go through how to get access so if you request access and someone else has access so let's say your lawyer your accountant legalzoom whatever someone else did online filing for you they still have access to it then when you request access it'll go to them and hopefully they will give you permission to do to access that system but let's say nobody has access because it was created 10 years ago that what they what happens is when you request access they send a letter with a pin number to the address on record for your llc so hopefully that address is right if that address is an address you have no access to it's a wrong address nothing's going to get forwarded then you're going to need to change the address before you can do this and you're changing the address you're going to do that by filing a statement of information for your llc which you can't do through this online system now because you have to be connected so what you're going to do is file it via paper i'm going to show you where the paper forms are in a sec then once you correct the address you can come back and request access and get the letter with the pin and then connect it all up so it's a lot of steps but the idea is that it makes it more secure where do you get those forms anytime you want to see forms that are the pdf forms you go to the home page for the secretary of state of california go click on business and you're going to want to find where the forms are i've always found them be under hot topics there's forms samples and fees for business entities obviously this online filing isn't working if you need to file by mail or in person so you click on limited liabilities california and then you have the various pdf forms they also have links to the online system but they have the various pdf forms the pdf forms all still exist so if you scroll down here's the one to do a statement information via pdf which you can do to change the address so you can get everything connected and then also down here we're going to look at the termination forms via pdf i'm just going to go ahead and click on that so it opens this up that's if you can't get anything connected and you want to do if i do that via pdf and we're going to look at those forms to figure that out but let's say you now have your stuff all connected what do you do so the first thing you're going to do i'm going to go ahead and log in the first thing you're going to do before you file anything is you gotta make sure you can which means that your llc has to be valid right now it cannot have administratively suspended in some way shape or form so how you do that is you it should be under your records there should be a bit a list of business of things you have access to but if it's not under your records you can just search so you can see here for my law firm which is a corporation but an llc is going to have the same stuff here that i have active status which is good that my standing which is like does this government agency have any problem with you or not with the secretary of state which is sos is good with the ftb which is the franchise tax board which is taxes is good agent do i have a registered agent yep that's good and then this is about corporate fraud stuff s

Thanks Clair your participation is very much appreciated
- Weston Carli

About the author

Weston Carli

I've studied preservation at Woodbury University in Burbank and I am an expert in micro-g environment research. I usually feel crushed. My previous job was computer controlled machine tool operators I held this position for 13 years, I love talking about badminton and power lifting. Huge fan of Chloe Sevigny I practice athletics and collect film posters.