The compliance calendar your agent does — and does not — keep

More than one clock

Owners speak of "the annual filing" as if a company kept a single date. It keeps at least four, running on different mechanisms, and the confusion between them is the compliance industry's best salesman.

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The four clocks

Clock	Set by	Who watches it
Annual / biennial report	State law — anniversary of formation in many states, a fixed date in some (Florida's May 1 deadline is the famous one)	You. Some agents remind; almost none file by default.
Franchise / entity taxes	State law; some states fuse it with the report, some run it separately	You and your tax adviser.
Agent appointment	Your filing — continuous; changes only when you change it	The public record. Verify after every filing season.
Agent service contract	The vendor — annual renewal on the signup anniversary	The vendor's billing system, tirelessly. You, if you marked it.

What an agent's reminders are worth

Many commercial agents advertise compliance calendars and deadline alerts. Value them honestly: an email reminder is worth having and worth almost nothing. The failure mode the reminder industry never mentions is the reminder sent to the email of an employee who left, a spam folder, a dead domain. A calendar held in two places — your own system and the agent's — is a system. A calendar held only by a vendor is a hope with a logo on it.

The annual discipline

Once a year, in the same month as your report, do three things that take twenty minutes: read your entity's public record and confirm the agent and address it shows; confirm the agent's renewal price for the coming year before the card is charged; and confirm the contact the agent holds for you is a person who still works there. That small inspection prevents most of the case studies in this logbook.

And note the trap the calendar sets for the organized: none of these dates move when you change agents. A new agent inherits your deadlines; it does not reset them. The transfer of the watch is your signature, not the vendor's welcome email.

One year, two clocks — a worked example

Take two companies through the same year. A Florida LLC keeps the fixed-date clock: its annual report opens January 1, is due by May 1, and a late fee attaches the day after — the date never moves, which makes it easy to diarize and expensive to miss. A Delaware corporation keeps the franchise clock instead: annual report and franchise tax both due March 1, computed on shares or assumed par — the country's most consequential corporate deadline, and one no registered agent files for you by default. Its sibling, a Delaware LLC, keeps almost no clock at all: a flat annual tax due June 1 and no report — the agent record changes only when the company files the change itself.

Three entities, three different years — and in each, the agent's renewal invoice arrives on a fourth date, the anniversary of whenever you happened to sign up. Lay the four dates side by side once, in your own calendar, and you have done the whole of compliance calendaring. Everything else is reminders.