What a Business Entity Actually Is

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up method course on how a business is formed. It is not legal or tax advice, and it says so throughout: it teaches you what to ASK a lawyer or accountant, not the answer for your situation. The organizing idea is that any business entity is a bundle of FOUR decisions: who pays the debts (liability), who pays the tax (taxation), who owns it and how ownership moves (ownership and transfer), and who gets to decide (governance). Every form on earth, in every country, is a different answer to those four, so a learner who holds the four questions can read a form they have never seen. You will learn to read the FORMATION DOCUMENTS as primary sources: the articles of organization or incorporation, the operating agreement or bylaws, and the state's own filing portal. Then you take a first pass over the US forms (sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC and C-corporation) and settle the single most common misunderstanding in the subject: the S-corp is a TAX ELECTION, not an entity type. This is the general case of which the shipped course 'What They Built' is a worked example, where fraternal orders and building-and-loan associations turned out to be entity choices. The capstone asks you to pick a form for a real scenario and defend it against the four decisions.