The state has approved the company. Customers are ready to pay. And the one number every payment processor asks for is sitting in a queue at the IRS with no tracking and no estimated date. Accepting card payments before your EIN arrives is mostly off the table, but trading and getting paid is not.
This gap is one of the most frustrating parts of setting up from abroad, and it is where founders make decisions that cost them months later. What follows separates what genuinely works from what merely appears to.
What the EIN is for, and why processors insist
An Employer Identification Number identifies the company to the IRS. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with having employees.
Payment processors require it for a specific reason: they may have to report the payouts they make to you. To report a payment to a US entity they need that entity's tax identification number. Without it they cannot complete the reporting obligation that attaches to paying you, which is why "can I add it later" is usually answered no.
Understanding this changes how the problem looks. The processor is not being obstructive. It is being asked to make payments it cannot correctly report, and it will not do that.
What you can do immediately
The company legally exists from the moment the state approves the formation. That is the point at which you can contract, invoice and be paid. The EIN affects how you get paid, not whether you may trade.
So from day one you can sign contracts in the company's name, issue invoices from the company, and receive payment by bank transfer once an account exists. For a business selling to other businesses, particularly at higher values, this covers a great deal of what you actually need.
The bank account question
Most US business accounts require the EIN, which makes the ordering awkward: state approval, then EIN, then bank, then processor.
There are providers who will open an account with the formation documents alone and add the EIN afterwards, and availability changes regularly enough that any list here would date badly. It is worth asking directly rather than assuming, because the answer differs between providers and sometimes between applicants.
Where a US account is not yet possible, a multi-currency account that can receive US dollar transfers is often a workable interim step. It gets invoices paid. What it will not usually do is satisfy a card processor, which is a separate requirement. The account landscape is set out in a US business bank account as a non-resident.
The shortcut that causes the most damage
The obvious workaround is to take payments through a personal account and move the money across later. It works mechanically. It creates four problems, and they compound.
The income is attributed to you personally. Tax reporting from the processor names you, not the company. Explaining afterwards that the money was really the company's is a conversation you do not want to be having with any tax authority.
Your customers pay someone who is not the party they contracted with. The invoice is from the company; the payment goes to an individual. For a business customer with any procurement discipline this is an immediate question, and for a consumer it looks like something has gone wrong.
The liability separation weakens. The protection an LLC provides depends on the company being genuinely distinct from its owner. Systematically running company revenue through a personal account is the single clearest evidence that it is not.
The processor account is now misdescribed. A personal account used for commercial volume breaches most terms of service, and the usual outcome is a limitation at the moment volume becomes significant — which is to say, at the worst possible time.
A single payment from a friendly client in week one is a different order of problem from running a business this way for three months. But the distinction blurs quickly, and most founders who start doing it do not stop on schedule.
Accepting card payments in the gap: what genuinely works
- Bank transfer for larger invoices. Business customers are accustomed to it and frequently prefer it. It requires only an account, not a processor.
- Deposits against future work. Invoice a deposit now by transfer and take the balance on card once processing is live.
- A marketplace that handles payment. If your work fits one, the marketplace collects and pays you out under its own arrangements.
- Selling the waiting period honestly. Telling a customer that card payment goes live in a few weeks and offering transfer meanwhile is not the obstacle founders imagine. Most people simply pay.
Use the time rather than waiting through it
The EIN gap is the single best opportunity you will get to build the things that later cause rejections. Every item below is assessed when you apply for banking and processing.
- Finish the website properly. Clear description of what you sell, real pricing or an explanation of how pricing works, a working contact route.
- Write terms of service and a privacy policy naming the company exactly as on the formation certificate.
- Publish a refund policy that is easy to find. This reduces disputes later more than almost anything else.
- Sign the operating agreement. Required by banks, and asked for more often than founders expect.
- Set up bookkeeping from the first transaction rather than reconstructing it in April.
- Start the transaction log between you and the company — every contribution and withdrawal, dated.
- Prepare the document pack: formation certificate, operating agreement, passport scan, address proof. Have them named sensibly in one folder.
Founders who do this apply on the day the EIN arrives and are approved quickly. Founders who wait passively start assembling all of it while customers are already waiting.
Sequencing, and what depends on what
| Step | Needs | Typical wait |
|---|---|---|
| State formation | Nothing prior | Days to weeks by state |
| Registered agent | Arranged before or with formation | Immediate |
| EIN | Formation approved | Weeks from abroad |
| Bank account | EIN, usually | Days to two weeks |
| Card processing | EIN and a bank account | Days, if the site is ready |
| Website, terms, policies | Nothing prior | Do it during the wait |
The chain runs in one direction and the EIN is the bottleneck. The bottom row is the only part that can be pulled forward, which is precisely why it should be.
Making the EIN arrive sooner
There is no way to jump the queue, but there are ways to avoid adding weeks to it.
Most delays are self-inflicted: an application returned for an inconsistency restarts the clock entirely. The company name must match the formation certificate exactly, including punctuation and the entity suffix. The responsible party must be a person with authority, identified consistently. The reason for applying and the entity type must match the reality of the company.
Fax is generally faster than post for applicants without a US tax identification number, and a confirmation of transmission is worth keeping. What to do when an application comes back is covered in what to do when the IRS rejects your SS-4, and the routes available are compared in EIN by fax, phone and mail.
What to tell customers
Founders often treat the gap as something to conceal, which produces vaguer and less convincing communication than the truth would.
"Card payment goes live in a few weeks — until then I invoice by bank transfer" is an entirely ordinary thing for a new company to say. Nobody is surprised that a business formed last month is still switching things on. What does cause doubt is an evasive answer about why payment is going to a personal account, because that reads as a business with something to hide even when it has not.
Once processing is live
When the EIN arrives and the accounts open, two pieces of housekeeping are worth doing immediately rather than eventually.
First, move everything onto the company. Update invoice templates, the website checkout, any recurring customer arrangements and your accounting records so that the company is the party being paid everywhere. A residue of arrangements still pointing at a personal account is the thing that gets noticed later.
Second, reconcile the gap period honestly in your books. Payments received personally on the company's behalf should be recorded as what they were, with the transfer into the company account documented. This is exactly the kind of movement that belongs in the transaction log, and it matters for the filings covered in the penalty most foreign LLC owners never see coming.
Pricing the delay into your plans
The gap is not only an inconvenience, it is a cash flow event, and founders consistently underestimate it when planning a launch.
Work backwards from the realistic sequence. State approval takes days to weeks depending where you filed. The EIN takes several weeks from abroad. The bank takes days to a fortnight after that. Card processing takes a few days more, assuming the website is finished. Added together, the distance between deciding to form a company and taking a card payment on your own site is commonly two to three months rather than the two weeks people imagine.
Two practical consequences follow. Do not schedule a launch, an advertising campaign or a product release on the assumption that card payments will be live, because the one part of that chain you cannot influence is the part in the middle. And if you have committed costs during the wait — an agent, a domain, hosting, possibly advertising — make sure you can carry them from savings rather than from revenue that cannot yet reach you.
Founders who plan for three months and get six weeks are pleasantly surprised. Founders who plan for three weeks spend the difference in stress, and sometimes in the shortcuts described earlier.
Recurring revenue needs particular care
If your business model is subscriptions rather than one-off sales, the gap deserves more thought than it usually gets.
A one-off invoice paid by transfer is easy to move onto card later — the next sale simply uses the new checkout. A subscription is different, because every customer you sign up during the gap is on an arrangement you will have to migrate. Manual transfers that a customer has to remember each month have poor retention, and asking every early customer to re-enter card details later loses some of them.
Where you can, take the first period by transfer and be explicit that card billing follows, so the migration is expected rather than a surprise. Where the product allows, consider offering an annual term during the gap: one transfer covers twelve months, and by renewal the processing is long since live. That turns the constraint into a reason to ask for a longer commitment, which is a better outcome than apologising for it.
The short version
You can trade from the moment the company exists. Card processing generally waits for the EIN because the processor cannot report payouts without it. Bank transfer covers the gap for most business-to-business work. Running revenue through a personal account solves a short problem and creates four longer ones.
Use the wait to finish the website, the policies and the document pack, so that the day the number arrives you are applying rather than preparing. The full order of operations is in opening a US LLC from outside the United States, and if you would rather have the sequence handled without the gaps, it is part of our formation service.
If you would rather have this handled for you, our US LLC formation service covers it end to end. For the official position, see IRS EIN guidance.