Tax number, bank account, residence permit: the order to do them in

Setting up in Türkiye involves a short list of administrative steps that everyone has to do and nobody explains in the right order. Done in sequence they take a few weeks with very little effort. Done in the wrong order they generate a fortnight of repeated trips and a lot of frustration.

Below is the order, and what each item depends on.

1. Tax number

The Turkish tax number, the vergi kimlik numarası, is the key to the rest of the list. Almost every other step asks for it: opening a bank account, registering a company, signing a lease, taking out a phone contract.

It is issued by any tax office and costs nothing. In person it takes a matter of minutes with a passport. There is also an online route, which is slower but avoids the trip.

This is the item people skip because it sounds bureaucratic, and it is the one that unblocks everything else.

2. Turkish mobile number

Not on anyone's checklist, and needed for almost everything that follows. Bank verification, government portals and the identity systems behind them all assume a Turkish number.

A prepaid line takes minutes with a passport. One thing to know in advance is that a foreign handset brought into the country has to be registered against a passport to keep working on Turkish networks beyond an initial period, which surprises people several months later when their phone quietly stops connecting.

3. Company registration

The company can be set up before you have a residence permit and before you have a personal bank account. It needs the tax number, the articles of association, capital deposited according to the form you have chosen, and a registered address.

This is also the step where a decision made in ten minutes has consequences for years, since the choice between a limited and a joint stock company affects personal liability for tax debts and how a future sale is taxed.

4. The company's bank account

This is the account claiming depends on, and the reason is specific.

Article 119 of the implementing circular requires that spending you claim on moves through banking channels from the company itself. Payments made on a shareholder's personal card, or from a personal account, are not accepted at all. So the company account is not an administrative formality. It is the thing that converts your advertising, hosting and store commissions into reimbursable spending.

The practical advice is to open it early and route everything through it from the first day, including the small recurring subscriptions that founders habitually put on a personal card while the company is young. Those small payments are claimable, and they are the ones most often lost.

5. Your personal bank account

A residence permit is not legally required to open one, but banks apply their own compliance rules on top of the law and branches differ in what they want to see. What is usually asked for is the tax number, a passport with reasonable validity remaining, proof of an address and a Turkish mobile number.

Often this is done in a single visit, with the debit card following by post a week or two later.

6. Residence permit

This is the long pole, because it runs on appointment availability rather than on how quickly you can assemble documents. Start it early even though it sits low on the list of dependencies.

A short-term residence permit is the usual route for someone spending significant time here without working. Keep in mind that spending more than six months of a calendar year in Türkiye generally makes you personally tax resident, which is a separate consequence from the permit itself and worth deciding on purpose.

7. Work permit, if you need one

Only if you are going to work here. Owning shares in the company does not authorise you to work in it, and the two are commonly confused.

The company applies, not you, and it has to satisfy a financial test: paid-in capital of 500,000 TL, annual gross sales of 8,000,000 TL, or annual exports of $150,000. For a software company selling abroad the export figure is normally the easy one. There is also a ratio of five Turkish employees per foreign employee, with a grace period on a first permit.

What to bring with you

Most of the friction in this process comes from documents that live in another country, so the useful preparation happens before you fly.

• Your passport, with a comfortable amount of validity left on it
• Apostilled copies of anything the company registration needs from your home jurisdiction, which for a corporate shareholder usually means certificates of incorporation and good standing
• Sworn translations into Turkish, which have to be done by a translator recognised here rather than one at home
• Proof of an address, which can be a rental contract, a home country utility bill or a hotel booking of sufficient length, depending on what you are applying for
• Passport photographs, which are still asked for more often than you would expect

An apostille takes days or weeks depending on the country, and discovering you need one after you have arrived is the single most common way a two-week setup becomes a two-month one.

What causes the delays

Very little on this list is difficult. The delays come from three places, and all three are avoidable.

The first is doing things out of order, most often trying to open a bank account before getting a tax number. The second is documents from your home country that need an apostille or a sworn translation, which cannot be arranged at short notice from Istanbul and should be organised before you travel. The third is appointment availability for the residence permit, which is why it belongs at the start of the calendar even though it sits at the end of the dependency chain.

The company side of this is the part we handle, along with the filing routine that follows it. The personal side is yours, and it goes smoothly if you take it in the order above. What the programme pays once the company exists is the reason any of this pays off, and the calculator puts a number on it.