Xynephobia is the word of the day when discussing starting a business in Thailand.  It is not that the thai people do not want foreign investment here, the opposite would be true.  They just want control, they do not want to wake up one day and not own their own economy.  So in some ways they make it extremely frustrating and difficult for the layman to start a business here.  If you work with any number of professionals they can get around almost any road block the Thai people have set out there to restrict business investment.

Registering your company is easy, the hard part comes when you register with the tax authorities and try to get a bank account.  The thai government has set up a catch 22 for small business owners and allows a waver for investments that come through the board of investment.  What this catch 22 is, under most banks self imposed regulations, i.e. it is not a law, they require a Tax ID to set up a bank account.  Ok, so you think that you should just go get a tax ID and that would be easy, except that you need a bank account to get a tax ID.  Solution, you can do one of many things to get an account, remember it is not illegal to get an account, you are only getting people to violate bank policy or directives, not violate the law.  You can bribe them, that usually works and usually it does not take much to get them to comply.  You can spend countless hours calling branch after branch to find someone who is not privy to the interbank directives, they will give you an account no problem.  Finally, if none of these works, simply go to an area like Pattaya, with a lot of foreigners, they always give accounts there and never follow bank policy.

Most likely, if you use an outside company to assist with all this, they know how to do this quick, so you can do most of this in a week.  Otherwise it may take a month or longer if you do it yourself, like we did.  My suggestion is use an outside company to do all this, it is not expensive and it is well worth the money.  As far as advice on which company to choose, that will be up to you to decide, but I would interview them first to make sure they have experience with more than just registering a company.

I have been running my own successful business here in Bkk for over 3 years. I have personal and business bank accounts and run everything legitimately. It was a HUGE learning curve in the first year.

The one thing that made all of this possible was my great Thai partner, who runs his own business helping companies (foreign and Thai) navigate through all the different procedures, laws and issues here. The other thing that makes it all easier is a good spread of Thai business people at all levels of society.

I cannot stress enough how important this is.

If you are hitting 'walls', try not to be so critical of Thailand and Thai people (xenophobic?). Chances are very high that you are going about things the wrong way, and/or with the wrong people, yourself.

Good luck.

The truth is that I started from square one. I have also been doing business here for 3 years and I have started a second and third business here all three are making money, some more than others. Once I learned the system, you are right, you just have to go through the process once or twice and you can do anything here. When I started though, like many layman I new nothing and I did not have the luxury of a Thai partner that new a great deal about navigating the system. We had to learn step by step and sure, it was about like feeling around in the dark.

As far as my comments about Thailand being xynephobic, they are true, not with the people who you meet everyday or the vast majority of Thai people. They are true with the people who create an overly restrictive system that ranks 183 out of 190 by world bank on ease of doing business. They want control of who is coming in to do business here, which is understandable, because if they were not restrictive then they would wake up tomorrow and not own the country the lived in. That is where their business xynephobia comes from. Once you have a start and you know what you are doing, it is easy to do business here, I agree with you on that.

Like you I also have business accounts, but it took me several weeks to get one. Most banks required us to have a tax ID number to get the account, which we did not have. Finally, we found a bank that would give us an account and let us add the Tax ID in the account later. It was a big step, and we got the account and later a tax ID, then we added that to the account information and there was no problem after that. The problem is that we just did not know the system, we did not know where to go and we had to learn on our own by hitting as many road blocks as possible. If you hire someone, anyone, they know the system better than you. Anyone can do business here, they can have success here, but getting started can be expensive and frustrating if you do not know the system. That is the point to what I wrote.