The bottom line, Diamonds02, is that it depends entirely on where she lives. Assuming she lives within some city limits, the first stop should be the city offices. Business licenses tend to be fairly inexpensive (we pay $50 per year for our bookstore, IIRC), and don’t require formation of a corporation or other business entity.
To add a couple more anecdotes, my wife’s cousin in California (don’t recall which city) was told that she needed a city business license to run her annual neighborhood garage sale.
Here in small-town Montana, people who set up booths for the weekend at the annual motorcycle rally are required to purchase business licenses from the city and charge sales tax on taxable items they sell. Well, it’s a “resort tax,” since there is no sales tax in Montana, but the concept is the same.
There are lesser documents that may be sufficient.
When I wanted to set up a small business bank account like this the bank would not do it under my own name, only with a dba name (“doing business as”). To get that, I had to go down to City Hall and pay $25.00 for a business certificate. Took that to the bank and opened my account. The fine print does say on it that “This is not a license to do business. The operation of this business at the said location may still be subject to other local, state or federal laws.” I’m okay unless I start something like smelting or dry-cleaning, for instance, in my front yard.
The hardest part was coming up with a dba name that I liked.
I had already consulted an accountant and lawyer who both advised me to stay as a sole proprietor and not incorporate. Though I did make sure I homesteaded my house.
For a number of years my wife has operated a translation service from home in a suburb of Montreal. It is not clear whether she needs a business licence or not, but she doesn’t have one. She needs and has a licence to collect sales taxes. She is doubtless in violation of a local zoning regulation, but since no customer has ever called (in earlier times there were occasional courier deliveries and pickups, less often than once a week) no authority has ever taken notice. Anyway the purpose of the zoning laws are to prevent foot traffic (I am aware that purpose has nothing to with legalities), so she feels no moral compunction about this.
She does, of course, declare and pay income taxes on her earnings.
There’s a danger with the DBA. We added a second phone line in the house for my wife’s business (this was about 20 years ago). The line had an “unlimited long distance” plan. She used a lot of long distance. One day, the phone company called to ask some questions. We answered the line with the DBA name. The phone company representative said, “oh, you’re using this as a business line,” and shut it off.
In Oregon a little girl was shaken down for her massively illegal lemonade operation recently. Link.
You don’t say. I guess it’s high time I started operating my billion-dollar gumball machine legitimately.
