Company A trading as Company B

[Haze]

HI All

I wondered whether anyone knows anything about the law with respect to having one company trading as another company? I have seen it on sites before and was just wondering how you would process accounts, etc. So if anyone has any experience I'd love to hear about it.

Cheers
Andy

[sponna]

We have two "brands" (veedesign and dental media) trading under one master i.e. veedesign. All accounts are done via veedesign but any quotations, correspondence for the dental side are branded as dental media. We make the association clear in our small print. Seems to work fine.

[Haze]

Thanks for that.

[Shirker]

We are Health and Safety Management Consultants but trade as HSMC (short domain). Everything is in the name of HSMC - bank accounts, invoices, etc. Just has the 'trading as' bit on the website and headed paper. Works fine. E.g. http://www.hsmc.co.uk/index.php?page=about. As a bit of a back-up I also have hsmc registed as a limited but dormant company to stop anyone else setting up with that as their formal name. Doesn't mean a lot in reality as they can (and do) still trade as HSMC as that's not protected, but at least they can't register it as a name.

[Jeewhizz]

You could trademark that term shirker for the class(es) that relate to your business for some added protection

[Haze]

The reason I as asking is that we are thinking of diversifying some of our business, but still want to come under our present banner company. It's all in the planning stages at the moment (well it's in the "shall we or shan't we?" stage).
I noticed that Martin has trademarked the SiteHQ term as part of BeyondEgo.

[Stealth]

Bit of a latecomer to the post but heres my experience:

You can easily trade under any name as long as you make the association in the smallprint, and i would assume the registered address would be the same. As a ltd company you have to show your company number and address on invoices etc anyway.

You dont necessarily have to pay to register a trademark, simply using the TM symbol implies that you are using the name to trade with and wish to protect it, if anyone comes along later in the same industry and uses the name you have a case. However registering to use the (R) symbol greatly increases the protection. At last check, you can go through OHIM (office of harmonization for the internal markets) which is part of the EU to buy a trademark for close to 1k iirc, but this covers you for the whole of europe.

If you are trading under a name that differs greatly from the name of the registered company, it would be well worth trademarking it.
I hadnt thought of having the company registered but dormant, good idea!

[Whatever]

Last time I heard TM pretty much stands for 'totally meaningless' rather than giving much protection