Choosing a Provider in Sri Lanka

Roughly four: cross-border corporate service platforms, local BPO and accounting firms, bilingual teams based in Colombo, and EOR platforms. The choice follows from what you actually need this year — a legal entity that can sign and hold things, or a person who can stand at a government counter. For a team meant to operate here long term, local execution matters more than the size of the brand.

On quoted price, separate appointments usually win. But the cost of a delayed landing rarely comes from any single quote — it comes from nobody owning the sequence, with registration waiting on documents, the landlord waiting on registration, and hiring waiting on the office, while each party reports no problem at their end. Full service buys ownership of the order of events. If you already have someone internal who can run this full time, appointing separately is the better deal.

Ask three concrete questions: who physically viewed the office, whose name appears when dealing with government counters, and whether the person you contact is the person doing the work. Subcontracting is not the problem — undisclosed subcontracting is, because your timeline then depends on a chain you cannot see. Ask for the executing party of each stage to be named in the contract; the reaction to that request usually tells you more than the answer.

Check whether their local registered entity exists, how long it has existed, and whether the registered address is a real place of business rather than relying on a website. Ask for a video walk through the office and a direct conversation with the local lead who will actually handle your case. Not every team described as local is located locally.

A serious quote separates government fees from service fees, and states which items are one-off, which recur annually, and which cannot be known until they are incurred. The most useful question to ask is which lines are government charges being collected on your behalf. Whatever is left vague is usually what gets added later.

Against verifiable milestones rather than in one payment up front — certificate issued, account opened, visa approved. Put the size of any advance and the conditions for returning it in the contract. Recovering money afterwards is far harder than defining it beforehand.

A resident company secretary is a statutory role, not an optional service, and providers commonly offer it. Worth knowing what it means in practice: this person carries filing obligations on behalf of the company, so treat it as a compliance function you are appointing rather than a line item you are buying.

An EOR employs people through someone else entity, so you skip incorporation and start fastest. You also skip what an entity provides: local banking in your own name, contracting as yourself, applying for incentive status, and anything that accumulates over time. It suits validating whether the business works. Once the answer is yes, conversion is coming, and its cost belongs in the original decision.

No, and they should not. It is a commercial decision driven by sector, investment scale and whether you need expatriate headcount. What a provider can do is lay out the obligations, timelines and restrictions of each route so you can judge. A provider who recommends BOI before asking what your business does is worth a second look.

Rarely at registration itself — more often just after it. Many teams treat the certificate as the finish line, while banking, tax registration, sector licensing and premises compliance each still have to run. Treating registration as a milestone rather than the end removes most of the gap between expectation and reality.