Bizee vs. Doola for RIAs: Formation Is Not Registration

Once your LLC or corporation is formed, you or your compliance consultant files Form ADV with either the SEC or your state securities regulator, depending on assets under management and other thresholds that determine which one has jurisdiction over your firm. This registration process reviews your firm's actual business practices, fee structure, and conflicts of interest, not just its legal existence, so budget real time for it separately from the entity filing itself.

If you're a solo advisor or small practice registering with a single state regulator, and you already understand the Form ADV process, Bizee's flat filing fee and first-year included registered agent get the underlying entity formed cheaply. It won't help with your registration filing or compliance manual, both of which are separate, required steps.

It's increasingly common for a growing RIA to bring on remote analysts or paraplanners, sometimes based outside the US, to support client service without triggering the licensing requirements that apply to advice-giving staff. If a cofounder or key hire fits that pattern, Doola's EIN filing as a third-party designee skips the Social Security number requirement, and its bundled bookkeeping is useful if you'd rather not manage US tax filing on top of a registration process.

Having custody of client funds or securities, even indirectly, such as authority to withdraw client fees directly from their account, brings additional regulatory requirements under the SEC custody rule, including in many cases using a qualified custodian; the annual surprise examination generally applies to broader custody, not custody arising solely from fee deduction. Most small RIAs deliberately structure their operations to avoid custody entirely, using an independent qualified custodian for all client assets, specifically to avoid this additional compliance burden.

Every registered investment advisor is required to designate a chief compliance officer and maintain a written compliance manual covering areas like the code of ethics, advertising rules, and books and records requirements. For a solo advisor, this is often the founder wearing the CCO hat personally, but the manual itself needs to be a real, working document, not boilerplate downloaded and forgotten, since regulators do review it during examinations.

Net margins across the broader market average 8.56%¹, and accountants and auditors, a role with comparably strict licensing and fiduciary obligations, earn a median annual wage of $83,680 nationally². For an RIA setting its own advisory fee, that pay range is a useful anchor: an advisory fee structure that doesn't comfortably clear what a licensed professional in an adjacent regulated field earns rarely accounts for the compliance overhead of running a registered practice.

Say a new solo RIA sets up automatic advisory fee deductions directly from client accounts held at a qualified custodian, assuming this is routine and low-risk since it's a small, fixed percentage each quarter. Under the SEC custody rule, authority to deduct fees directly from a client account is treated as a form of custody, which brings some safeguards such as qualified custodian requirements, though the annual surprise examination generally doesn't apply when fee deduction is the only source of custody. Confirm with a compliance consultant whether your specific fee-deduction setup falls under a custody exception before assuming it's automatically fine, since the rules here are more technical than they first appear, and a wrong assumption can surface during your first regulatory examination.

State filing fees average $132 nationally³, a minor cost next to the compliance consultant fees and CCO responsibilities that come with actual RIA registration. If you're a domestic, single-state advisor who understands the registration process, Bizee gets the entity filed cheaply. If you're building a distributed team, Doola's bundle is worth the extra cost.

Follow this order to get from formation to a compliant advisory firm:

1. Form the LLC or corporation, remembering that it gives you a legal entity and not permission to advise clients for pay.
2. Work out whether the SEC or your state securities regulator has jurisdiction, then file Form ADV directly or through a compliance consultant.
3. Hold client assets with an independent qualified custodian, and check whether your authority to deduct fees counts as custody under the SEC rule.
4. Designate a chief compliance officer, which can be you as a solo advisor, and write a working compliance manual rather than boilerplate.
5. Choose Bizee for a domestic single-state advisor, or Doola if you are building a distributed team.