Five families cover most of it
Entity obligations: annual reports, franchise taxes, registered agent renewals, in every state where you are registered. Licenses and permits: business licenses, professional licenses, industry-specific permits, each with its renewal rhythm. Tax deadlines beyond income: sales tax filings, payroll deposits, contractor reporting, at their federal, state and local frequencies. Insurance: policy renewals plus the certificates counterparties require of you. And contractual obligations: the renewal notices, reporting duties and deadlines your own signed agreements created.
The fifth family is the one everyone forgets, and it is the one this desk’s contracts already know about, because every agreement you sign is also a deadline generator.
Capture at the source, own it once
Deadlines enter the calendar the day they are born: when the entity registers, when the license issues, when the contract signs, never during a year-end sweep that trusts memory. Each entry carries the date, the lead time to act, the owner and the consequence of missing, which is what lets you rank when weeks get bad.
One named owner runs the calendar, typically whoever owns operations, not because they do every filing but because shared ownership of deadlines is how deadlines get missed. Growth adds states, licenses and obligations; the calendar is also where expansion becomes concrete instead of vaguely riskier.
The monthly minute, and the buffer rule
The ritual is a monthly look-ahead: what comes due in the next sixty days, is each item owned and started, did anything new get created that has not been captured? Ten minutes, standing, boring, and the entire difference between compliance as background hum and compliance as an annual emergency.
Work the buffer rule everywhere: act at the start of the window, not the deadline, because filings bounce, portals fail and signatories travel. A company that files early is a company whose bad weeks stay ordinary.
The desk generates the calendar for you
The Legal Desk’s compliance registry holds the five families with dates, owners and lead times, the deadline engine surfaces the sixty day look-ahead on My Day, and signed contracts feed their own renewal and notice obligations in automatically, which closes the family everyone forgets.
Velora drafts the obligation entries from your licenses and agreements as you file them. The monthly minute becomes reading a screen that is already right, from the Plus membership.
This guide is operational education for business owners, not legal advice. Laws vary by state and country; have licensed counsel review anything material before you rely on it.
Frequently asked questions
What compliance deadlines do small businesses miss most?
Annual entity reports, license renewals with long lead times, sales tax in newer states, and contract-created obligations like renewal notice windows, the family that lives outside most calendars.
Who should own the compliance calendar?
One named person, usually the operations owner: they do not do every filing, but single ownership is the difference between a calendar and a rumor.
How far ahead should we look?
Sixty days, monthly, acting at the start of each window. Buffer absorbs the bounced filing and the traveling signatory that deadlines never account for.