There is a version of this decision that sounds like a law lecture, and a version that sounds like what actually happens. This is the second one.
Almost nobody in Botswana starts out by registering a company. You start by doing the thing — the catering, the haulage, the consulting, the hair — and you get paid into your own account because that is the account you have. That is trading as a sole proprietor, and it is completely legal. The question is not whether you are allowed to. It is how long it stays the right answer.
What a sole proprietorship actually is
A sole proprietorship is not a thing you register. It is what you are by default the moment you start trading in your own name. There is no separate entity: you and the business are one legal person. The income is your income, the debts are your debts, and if something goes wrong, the claim lands on you personally.
That is the whole trade-off, and it cuts both ways. Nothing to set up, nothing to file, nothing to maintain — and nothing between a bad year and everything you own.
A trading licence is a separate question from a company registration. Depending on what you do and where you do it, you may need a licence from your council whether or not there is a company behind you.
What a (Pty) Ltd changes
A Proprietary Limited company is a second legal person, created when CIPA registers it. It has its own name, its own registration number, its own tax number, and it can hold contracts, bank accounts and assets in that name.
Four things follow from that, and they are the reasons anyone bothers:
- Limited liability. The company owes the money, not you. The protection is real but not absolute — it does not survive a personal guarantee, and most banks will ask for one on a new company’s loan.
- Continuity. The company does not end because you do, which is what makes a business sellable, inheritable, or able to take on a partner.
- Credibility you can prove. A registration number and a tax clearance certificate are what a corporate customer, a bank and a tender process ask for. Without them you are often not non-compliant, just not eligible.
- A clean line between your money and the business’s money. This sounds like bookkeeping pedantry until the first time you have to explain a year of mixed transactions to a bank or BURS.
So what does it cost to find out?
The cost side is the part people overestimate. Registering a company in Botswana through PulaGo is P750 in total — P380 of CIPA charges for the name reservation and the registration itself, plus our P370 for preparing and lodging everything. You pay P500 to start and P250 once the company is actually registered.
What is genuinely ongoing is smaller than people fear and larger than nothing. A company has a statutory company secretary — PulaGo appoints a vetted one for P300 — and it files an annual return with CIPA every year. If you register for VAT or take on employees, those bring their own monthly filings. If you do neither, the maintenance is close to the annual return and the licence renewal.
CIPA sets its own fees and can change them. Check the current schedule on cipa.co.bw before you budget.
The moment it stops being a close call
In practice, the decision is almost never made in the abstract. It is made by someone else asking a question you cannot answer. Watch for these:
- A customer asks for your company registration number before they will raise a purchase order.
- A bank will not open a business account in a trading name without a certificate of incorporation.
- A tender or supplier application asks for a tax clearance certificate, which BURS issues against a registered taxpayer.
- A landlord wants the lease in a company name rather than yours.
- You are about to take on a partner, and there is no clean way to say what each of you owns.
- You are about to do something with real downside — carry stock, employ people, sign a long lease, take on a contract you could be sued over.
If none of those are true yet, you are probably fine where you are, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. If two or more are true, the question has already been answered for you.
The order that saves you a month
When you do register, the sequence matters more than the speed. Registration makes the company exist. It does not make it allowed to trade, and it does not make it bankable.
- Reserve the name with CIPA. Have two or three alternatives ready — names get rejected for being too similar to existing ones, and a rejection costs you a round trip.
- Register the company, with the constitution and the consent forms every director, shareholder and secretary has to sign.
- Register with BURS for your Taxpayer Identification Number. PulaGo does this for P350, including obtaining your tax clearance certificate.
- Apply for whichever licence your activity needs, from the council where you will operate.
- Open the business bank account — with the resolution, mandate and company documents the bank will ask for.
Doing step five before step three is the most common way to lose two weeks, because the bank asks for the tax number you have not got yet.
What if you already started as a sole trader?
Nothing is wasted. You do not convert a sole proprietorship into a company — you register a company and move the business into it: new contracts in the company name, a new bank account, the licence applied for by the company, and a clean cut-off date in your books.
The part worth doing properly is that cut-off date. Pick one, and after it, everything goes through the company. A business with a messy six months where both were half-true is a business that cannot produce clean figures for a bank, and clean figures for a bank are usually why you registered.
Our honest position
We register companies, so take this with the appropriate salt: if you are testing an idea, have no stock, no staff and no contracts, registering a company is a cost without a job to do. Wait. When the first person asks for your registration number, that is the signal — and at that point it is a two-working-day problem, not a two-month one.
PulaGo is a private company, not a government agency, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by CIPA, BURS or PPRA. You can register a company directly with CIPA at cipa.co.bw. Our fees are always shown separately from government fees.