The rain has finally stopped. We are hoping our business will have a little more momentum. With poke being a cold dish, weather seemed to have a big impact on number of customers. I guess rain probably has an impact on people's behavior. They do not seem to want to come out of the house to eat. Lunch has not been too bad, but dinner time, I have been told, has been pretty slow. Now that rain is over, hello customers!

Our yelp reviews are doing pretty good. We are currently at 4.5 stars with 12 reviews. Hopefully we can keep this up. Staying 4 stars or above is important!

It has been a couple days since the business has fully opened. However, mother nature has not been cooperating with us. Off and on, rain is keeping customers indoors. We are thinking about some advertisements. 

Usually, around this time after initial business set up, the main website for a business should also be created. Depending on how much funds we have at our disposal, we can either hire an outside consultant to create a website for us, or we can set one up by using a self-service website.

We were also finally able to create a yelp account for this location. Yelp seems to have a huge impact to popularity of a restaurant. I don't blame them. I, too, search through yelp reviews before deciding where to eat. It is amazing how important yelp has become.

We are now in full business. Now that we have employees working for our store, we need to make arrangements to pay them payroll. We have contacted and set up an account at Paychex, the payroll company.

Once the account has been set up, the payroll company processes all paychecks and issues direct diposits to our employees. Some younger employees(We have student employees working part time) who do not necessarily have bank accounts may ask us for hard copies of the checks. We pay our payroll on a by montly basis. My dad will collect all hours worked by employee and submit this and their hourly rate to the payroll company so that the payroll checks can be calculated and issued.

We had a successful soft opening over the weekend. We are all very excited. Our business location shows lot of potential.

Our next step for the back office set up involves filing a  reseller's certificate with the CA State Board of Equalization, A reseller's certificate is basically a registration of our business of our business with the state to let the know that we are collecting and paying sales taxes. This is a mandatory requirement for all businesses. Once the certificate is approved, we will be receiving a monthly reminder from the State Board of Equalization for the monthly payments due which reflects reporting of the total sales and use tax from our customers. This payment will be made online through a bank draft. We then follow with a quarterly tax return to reconcile the amounts.

Today we applied for a business license at the City Hall of La Habra. What I found out was that every city has a different procedure for receiving a business license.

Now that most of the necessary legal findings have been done, we are now ready to open a bank account for our business. You may think that setting up a bank account may not be very important so early in the setup, but it turns out bank accounts are necessary early in order to be able to accept credit card purchases. This is because there are more credit card users than cash customers. Even I use credit card.

Opening up a new bank account turned out to be very simple. My father already had a contact person he has been working with at the bank from his earlier businesses. So we were able to process all necessary paperwork via email and a simple phone call. We emailed them a certified copy of the SOS Article of Organization, Fictitious Business Name Statement, and the Federal ID Number. The bank account will be opened in the name of our new business entity. I learned how important it is to have good business connections.

Once the bank account was set up, we moved on to set up something called the Point of Service ("POS").  It's basically a register system used at the stores to manage cash and credit card registers.

One final account to open involved managing relationships with vendors and distributors. Separate accounts were required for each and every supply necessary to run our store. Most of the accounts were set up so that the necessary supplies would be delivered directly to our store.

We are almost towards the end of our back office filings. I am excited to announce that we are targeting the soft opening this weekend! (Soft opening refers to inviting various potential customers to try out our food without charging them)

So today my dad received the certified copy of the form LLC-1, Secretary of State Articles of Organization. And as SunDoc promised, it was processed within 24 hours. The first step neccessary to open a business is now complete. The form included a certified stamp by the Secretary of California, the date it was filed, and the SOS number of our LLC.

The next step is to file for a Federal Employment Indentification Number(FEIN) with the IRS. We were able to apply for this online at www.IRS.gov. The FEIN number was available immediately as soon as we completed the online form. I learned that form 941, Employer’s Quarterly Federal Tax Return, must be filed every quarter to report wages and payroll tax information. Then form 940, Employer's Annual Federal Unemployment Tax Return, must also be filed annually.

Similar to the FEIN, we needed to also file for the State Employment Identification Number with the Employment Development Department. This again, we were able to do by going to www.edd.ca.gov.

One additional preliminary step included filing the Ficticious Business Name Statement with the Orange County Recorder's Office. This is a public notice that is filed with the county that provides information about the business that is about to open in their county. It includes the DBA(Doing Business As) name and the ownership information of the DBA. Upon filing online, we received a form stamped by Hugh Nguyen, the Orange County Clerk Recorder.

The first thing that I get to participate in is to help with the business entity set up. Once it is set up, it will be the legal owner of the Poke bowl business. Then the entity, in turn, will be owned by my dad and his partners. This entity/owner relationship is necessary to avoid various legal issues.

Our business entity is going to be in the form of a partnership called a Limited Liability Company("LLC").

So today my dad and I went to to the California Secrertary of State office located in Downtown Los Angeles to form the LLC. However, we found out that the LLC forms are usually filed online and then must be mailed directly to the Sacramento office. It turns out, in order to do an in-person expedited service, we would need to drive all the way to Sacramento. So we came back home and did online research to figure out a way to resolve our issue. It was ironic that we went to the physical office to expedite our filings, but ended up wasting time instead.

(To provide a little bit of explanation on why we needed to expedite our filings: we are targeting our store to open at the beginning of the new year. We did not want to begin any related business and tax paperwork during 2016 just in case it created 2016 IRS tax filing requirements. I learned that unless the entity is <14 days of year end, a filing of the tax return is necessary, which means that even if we are only in business for two weeks, we have to pay a full $800 to the California State and have to incur the cost of preparing the entity's tax return. This means the total cost of being in business for two weeks will be a lot higher than the money we would be making during the same two week period. This basically answered my question as to why don't we open as soon as we can? So we decided to wait until 2017 to start our business formation and expedite it as much as possible.)

Upon researching, we found a business called SunDoc Filing that provides a service that included an in person drop off at the Sacramento SOS office. So we filled out their application and paid various fees including: filing fees, service fees, and extra expedite fees. This added up to be a whopping $600. Extra fees were paid, but hopefully, it will pay off in the end by being able to start our business on time in addition to avoiding 2016 tax filings.