On Jun 24, 2010, at 11:31 PM, Matt James wrote: > 1) Does anyone have experience going from a personal Apple Developer account > to a business one? Ideally, I'd like to pay the $99 and get started right > away testing my app on my iPad and worry about upgrading to a business > account later. Is it possible to upgrade my account at any time or do I > need to create another one for my business and throw down another $99 at > that point?
You can convert a personal account to a business account without paying another $99. You'll need to provide some business documents to prove your company's identity to Apple in order to have your account migrated. You'll briefly lose access to the developer portal during the migration and you'll have to review and agree to one or more license agreements on behalf of your company. You'll need to contact Apple via the form at https://developer.apple.com/contact/ to begin the process of migration. There's more information available at https://developer.apple.com/support/iphone/enrollment.html. > 2) Other than the obvious benefits of separation between business and > personal finances, is there a clear advantage to selling your app on the App > Store as a business rather than via a personal account? I don't know of any advantage in terms of sales on the App Store. In the United States, there are advantages in general to starting a business as opposed to working as a hobby (mostly due to the insanely complex tax code .) > I'm leaning toward > starting an LLC in my state, but didn't know if I could dip my toe in the > App Store water before investing even more money into my app which I'm not > sure will even sell well enough to be sustainable. I personally operate as a sole-proprietorship which has minimal legal start-up costs (the cost of a "Doing Business As" filing and a business license in your locality.) I've thought about converting to an LLC, but I'm not convinced that there are any advantages in that structure for what I'm doing and the complexity of the tax situation generally increases as you move up the business scale from sole-proprietorship. When I entered into the sales agreement with Apple, I needed an account with a bank that had an international SWIFT code. This was required to transfer payments to your account from around the world. I'm not sure if the SWIFT code is still necessary. -- Tony Ingraldi http://www.majestysoftware.com/ Old-fashioned values and high-tech know-how
