Register A Business In Malaysia

By Sarah Lam on May 13, 2009

Update 14 May 11 am: No sign of application approval. Called SSM once again and given them the reference number for investigation. So tiresome.

I have recently registered my business in my country, Malaysia and all I can say about the experience – a mess!

Seriously, I wonder why when I have to deal with the government, things will go bad / wrongly.

Basically, I had attempted to register three times. I registered online and I thought that doing this online would be much better than going to the office (since the office is rather far from me and transportation is a problem).

First time: I registered to be a member of SSM and apparently, they didn’t receive my payment of RM5 so I had to call a few numbers to get the problem solved. This cause me to lose more money for the phone calls because guess what, the bank love to torture their clients by assigning a 1800-number for customer service so that we (the clients) will have to pay more for the phone calls. Then again, the government service love to put us on hold for a very, very long time – again, more money for the phone calls.

Second time: This time they waive the SSM membership fee (as a way to encourage more people to register their business and due to the recession). Naturally, I thought this was a great idea. Then the nightmare began when there was a problem with the payment for business registration (that costs RM60 a year). The problem this time was wrong payment method – therefore the payment was not deducted from my bank account. I wasted 2 days waiting for the approval of application only to find that my application wasn’t submitted at all. Once again, I had to endure the torture of calling to different agencies/bank to get this solved and more money losing this time.

Third time: Finally, I managed to register properly this time. Hopefully, there won’t be any troubles at all after this. I paid the RM60 successfully and I am hoping to get the business registration certificate tomorrow (14 May 2009).

My suggestion for fellow Malaysians:

I guess I was registering at the wrong time/day. I don’t know. However, I would suggest you to go through all the steps on malaysia.gov.my (used to be gov.my) before you register for anything. Alternatively, if you have doubt on anything, give them a call beforehand to avoid the hassle of the aftermath.

My business name: Sarah Writing Consultation (Sole Proprietor)

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