Letterhead Compliance Checker

Section 12(3)(c) of the Companies Act 2013 requires every company registered in India to print its name, the address of its registered office and its Corporate Identity Number — along with its telephone number and, where they exist, its email and website addresses — on all its business letters, billheads, letter papers, notices and other official publications. It is one of the most routinely missed compliance requirements in Indian corporate practice, precisely because it looks like a design decision rather than a statutory one. A founder orders letterheads from a printer or builds one in a design tool, nobody involved knows the section exists, and the company operates for years on stationery that is technically in default.

The consequences are not theoretical. Failure to comply attracts a penalty of one thousand rupees for every day the default continues, subject to a maximum of one lakh rupees. Because the penalty accrues daily rather than as a one-time fine, a letterhead printed without a CIN and used for two years represents meaningful exposure. The same obligation extends to invoices and billheads, which is why a GST invoice issued on non-compliant letterhead compounds the problem across every customer you have billed.

Limited liability partnerships carry a parallel duty. Section 21 of the Limited Liability Partnership Act 2008 requires an LLP to ensure that its invoices, correspondence and official publications bear its name, the address of its registered office and its LLP Identification Number. Partnership firms and sole proprietorships have no CIN or LLPIN and therefore no equivalent obligation, though a business registered under GST must still display its GSTIN on every tax invoice it issues.

This checker runs your entity type and identifiers against those rules and tells you, document by document, what is present and what is missing. It validates the structure of your CIN, verifies your GSTIN against its mod-36 check digit so a typo is caught rather than trusted, and cross-checks that the company class encoded in your CIN matches the entity type you selected. Each finding cites the provision it comes from so you can take the report to your company secretary or chartered accountant rather than take our word for it. Nothing you enter is transmitted or stored — the entire check runs in your browser.