Address services FAQs

The address for your company should be written as follows:
[Name of Your Company]
27 Old Gloucester Street
London
WC1N 3AX
United Kingdom

You will specify an address for mail to be forwarded to when you set up the service. However, you can change this at any time by sending us an email with your new details. You may also elect for your mail to be recycled (without being physically forwarded on). In this case you will only receive the mail electronically.

Our digital mailroom is a secure portal where we will upload your scanned mail. The benefits of this service:

• All your historical mail in one place.
• More secure than email.
• Multiple authorised users.

You can login to the digital mailroom by visiting https://portal.elementalcosec.com/

The mail is scanned and then forwarded to your specified physical address, generally on the same (working) day it is received.

All of our mail contracts are on a yearly basis.

Payment for the full year is taken in advance and you can pay by bank transfer, PayPal or by card.

Prior to the end of the year, we will send you an invoice for the next year’s service. In order to renew, you merely need to pay the invoice prior to the end of the year.

You can cancel at any time, although you will not receive a refund for any pre-paid amounts.

No. In order to provide the service at these prices, we have to keep our systems as streamlined as possible. This means that we must forward all mail when received.

Although in different guises, the mail forwarding business has been operating from this address for over 80 years.

Elemental has been established for over 10 years and our mail forwarding partner has been operating from the address for 80 years. We manage the mail for clients including banks, law firms, and even parts of the UK government.

We need certain information about the company and how you would like the mail handled. We also need to collect certain identification information on the beneficial owners as required by law. All of the details are set out in our registration form which can be found here.

Once we have all the required information and payment has been made, the service can start immediately.

No.

Yes, though this is part of our process agent service.

Simply complete our address service registration form that you can find here. Alternatively, please contact us and we can take your details manually.

A registered office is the official address for a UK company or partnership. It must be a physical address in the UK (it cannot be a PO Box) and it is a place for the company to receive official mail and it must be registered at Companies House.

The registered office service covers the handling of all statutory mail, but not other mail.

We define statutory mail as mail from HM Revenue & Customs and Companies House.

Promotional or ‘spam’ mail will be destroyed. As a general rule, if a small amount of business mail is received we will still forward it on, although we reserve the right not to. If a significant amount of non-statutory mail is received, we will contact you about upgrading your service. If you think you are likely to receive important non-statutory mail we would recommend using the “Business Address” service.

A company is required to specify its registered office in certain circumstance, such as on invoices and letters. You can do this with our service, but it is up to you to ensure that customers send correspondence or business mail to your trading address and not to the registered office.

Yes, you can upgrade at any time.

Of course. You will need to sign up for the registered office service and on the form there is an option to select that the company has not yet been formed. Once the sign up process is complete you can form the company.

Alternatively, you can form the company through Elemental CoSec and we will deal with everything. Please see here for our incorporation services.

Yes you can. Two service addresses are included in the Registered Office Plus service for no extra charge.

No, not for the registered office service or registered office plus.

No, our registered office service includes the forwarding of statutory mail to anywhere in the world.

Companies House require all directors and persons of significant control (PSC) to provide an address to include on the public record where they can be contacted. This does not need to be their residential address and therefore they can use our address instead.

Yes. Companies House do need to be provided with the residential address of every director and PSC, but it is not public information.

You will need to purchase the service for each director or PSC who wishes to use it. However, you only need the service once for each individual. So if an individual is a director and a PSC this would only count as one service.

No. We only provide this service as an added option for our Registered Office or Registered Office Plus service (note: our registered office plus service includes two service addresses).

Members (or partners) of an LLP also need to provide a service address and this service can be used in the same way as if they were a director.

We will forward it in the same manner as it is received. However, if you have any special instructions, please just let us know.

We charge £4 per item of scanned mail, this also covers any charges for forwarding the mail.

Yes, the registered office service is included in the price.

Yes, the service address is included as standard for all directors and PSC when you use the Business Address service.

We can email a word version of our online form in either English or Chinese for you to complete, sign and date then return to [[email protected]] as a scanned copy. We will then issue an invoice for payment, which can be made via card or bank transfer.

For setting up the service, you can contact us at [email protected]. However, we only accept service by physical delivery, this ensures that no service is missed. In terms of the Contact Name, this should just be completed as ‘The Directors’

We do not normally charge for the mail forwarding of any notices received in respect of your process agent service nor do we charge according to the number of agreements you wish the service to cover provided that the Appointer is a named party in each of the agreements described in the submitted application form. We would only charge in the event that the cost of dealing with the notices was excessive (e.g. because the Client was hard to contact or in the event that the number of proceedings issued against the company were very high). In our experience this is very rare.

The contract between ourselves and the Appointer is governed by the signed application form and our terms and conditions accessible from the link https://www.elementalcosec.com/terms-and-conditions-of-service/terms-and-conditions-for-process-agent-service/. This link is found in the completed application form and the applicant will need to confirm that they have read and accepted these.

Unfortunately, our fees are not refundable. You do have the option to select a shorter initial term, in respect of all our services we invite our process agent clients usually one month before the end of any appointment term to renew. If you wish to extend the appointment period beyond the initial term, we would charge a renewal fee and the applicable annual fee for the extension.

UK companies are UK tax resident by default and although we can obtain a tax residency certificate from HMRC, we charge £50 to do this as it needs to be carried out for each country.

We only provide process agent services in the United Kingdom.

By default, we use an electronic signature for our formal appointment letters which is why we send by email. This is entirely proper under UK law, but we can reissue the letter with a traditional ‘wet’ signature if this is necessary.

No, provided the invoice is addressed to a non-UK resident or entity. We are VAT registered, but for most process agent clients, the service is outside the scope of VAT.

In limited circumstances, we can review and sign a third-party appointment letter. We can not sign a letter that unreasonably changes our obligations as a process agent, particularly with respect to the scope or duration of the appointment.