Before you can legally sell business to the Government, you need to register with a few organizations. To kick this process off, you need to obtain a Data Universal Number System (DUNS). It’s essentially a generic id number to identify your company.

Prerequisites
<code>[list style="list1" color="gray"]</code>
<ul>
	<li>Legal Company Name</li>
	<li>Company Address</li>
</ul>
[/list]

You can read about it further here: http://www.dnb.com/

The actual application is here: https://iupdate.dnb.com/iUpdate/companylookup.htm

This takes time. In our experience, this could be a few days to two weeks. D&amp;B claims within 30 days, but realistically, unless you have Company name trademark issues, turnaround will be sooner. We haven’t paid to expedite this, but if you’re in a crunch, that option is available.

See below for the steps involved in the registration.

Step 1: Search for a business name. This is to verify your entity. Since you are starting a new business, this search should be fruitless.