Founders who have already registered a company tend to assume that starting an association will be a lighter version of the same errand. The two files rarely behave that way. A commercial entity is organised around ownership shares, activity codes and the distribution of profit. A non-profit is organised around a stated purpose, a group of founding members and a set of internal rules that has to hold together on paper before anyone signs anything. From a distance the paperwork looks similar. It diverges as soon as the folder is opened.
That difference shows up in the way a consultancy structures its offer. ADISAF SRL, a firm active since 2015 with its office on Calea Floreasca in Bucharest, lists the formation of an association or foundation as a service in its own right, on the same footing as the commercial forms it handles, rather than as an appendix to company registration.
A separate line on a list of twenty-four services
The company’s website enumerates twenty-four services for companies and sole traders, grouped into five directions: formations, changes and filings, suspension or reactivation and deregistration, registered office matters, and legal services including trademark registration with OSIM. Within the formations group, the entity types are listed one by one — SRL, sole trader forms such as PFA, II and IF, the debutant SRL-D, the joint-stock SA, the partnership forms SNC, SCS and SCA, and, on its own line, the NGO in both of its shapes: association and foundation.
Listing it separately is a small editorial decision with practical consequences. It means the non-profit founder arrives at a page written for that situation rather than at a general company-formation page with a paragraph appended at the bottom. It also signals that the firm expects the questions to be different — about members, purpose and governing bodies rather than about share capital thresholds and turnover.
The rest of the site is built the same way, with a page for each service and a blog of roughly thirty informative articles covering procedural topics such as activity codes, beneficial owner obligations, dividends, electronic invoicing and the microenterprise regime. Readers who want the full picture of what the firm does can start from the overview presented by ADISAF and work outward from there.
Where the administrative work stops and the legal work begins
One structural point is repeated across the site, and it matters more for non-profit files than for most others. ADISAF states that the legal documentation is drafted, reviewed and assumed by a collaborating law office registered with the Bucharest Bar, in line with Law no. 51/1995, while the consultancy itself keeps to administrative work and operational coordination.
For an association or a foundation, that boundary is not a formality. The founding documents describe what the entity exists to do, who decides what, how members join and leave, and how the governing bodies are composed. These are drafting questions with legal weight, not form-filling. Under the arrangement the company describes, that part of the work sits with the lawyer, and the consultancy handles the sequencing, the collection of documents and the contact with the client.
The site is equally direct about what the firm is not. It carries an explicit disclaimer stating that ADISAF is not a government institution and does not represent the Trade Register or any other public authority. For a founder who has never dealt with a registration file before — a common profile in the non-profit world, where the initiative often comes from teachers, doctors, parents or volunteers rather than from career entrepreneurs — that clarification is worth reading twice.
Four steps, and a different pile of paperwork inside them
The working model published on the site has four stages: an initial discussion, preparation of the documentation, submission of the file, and handover of the resulting documents. Delivery is presented as fully online and available anywhere in the country, through telephone, e-mail and WhatsApp, with a visit to the Bucharest office remaining optional rather than expected.
The four steps stay the same whatever entity is being registered. What changes is the content of the second one. A commercial file is largely a matter of choices that can be made quickly once the rules are explained — the form of the company, the activity codes, the address, the administrator. A non-profit file requires a group of people to agree, in writing and in advance, on the purpose of the organisation and the way it will be run. The preparation stage for an association therefore carries a discussion that a standard company file does not need, simply because more of the substance has to be settled before the documents can be finalised. The other three stages — the initial conversation, the filing itself and the handover of the registered documents — follow the same sequence described for any other entity.
Working online rather than in a waiting room helps here. Founding members of an association are frequently spread across different towns, hold day jobs and are giving the project their evenings. A process that runs on messages and calls, with an optional in-person meeting, fits that reality better than one that requires everyone in the same room on a weekday morning.
Obligations that continue after the entity exists
Registration is the beginning of the administrative relationship, not the end of it. The company’s service list makes that visible. Its page dedicated to the beneficial owner declaration is titled for both companies and NGOs, which reflects a reality many founders discover late: an association is subject to reporting obligations of its own, and the fact that it distributes no profit does not exempt it from them.
Other services in the catalogue follow the same after-the-fact logic — changes filed with the Trade Register, updates to activity codes, changes of registered office or of the person in charge, and, at the other end of the life cycle, suspension, reactivation and deregistration. The site also presents registered-office hosting at a Bucharest address as a solution for founders without premises of their own, with the hosting contract normally concluded for one to three years and renewable.
Continuity is presented as part of the offer. Among the figures displayed on the homepage, alongside more than thirty years of declared entrepreneurial experience, twenty-four services and nationwide online delivery, the firm advertises a single point of contact for the whole process. The team named on the site includes Florin Mihalcea, mentioned as founder, and Antonia Mihalcea. The company also registered its own slogan as a trademark with OSIM in 2015 — a detail that says something about how it views the paperwork it recommends to others.
Costs, timelines and how the firm answers
The website does not publish a price list. The stated model is a request for an offer, with a personalised estimate produced after the initial discussion. For non-profit files that approach is defensible on its own terms: the work depends on how settled the founding group is, how complex the intended purpose is, and how much drafting the documents require. A single figure printed on a page would say very little about any of that.
Timelines are treated the same way. Where the company does publish a duration, it does so with the reason attached — deregistration, for example, is described as taking roughly fifty to sixty days because of the thirty-day legal opposition period. The company is identified on the site as ADISAF SRL, registered under CUI 34620422, and it answers on weekdays between 09:00 and 17:00 Romanian time. Enquiries in English, including those from founders and investors who are not residents in Romania, are directed to a dedicated English-language section, where the firm undertakes to reply on the same working day; the contact page for English-speaking founders belongs to that section. The contact form used on the site asks for a name, an e-mail address, a telephone number, a service category picked from a drop-down and a message, and the telephone number, the e-mail address and a WhatsApp number are published alongside it.
For anyone weighing whether to assemble a non-profit file alone or hand it over, the useful question is not how much of the work can be done without help. It is which parts of it carry consequences if they are drafted badly — and, in the case of an association or a foundation, most of those parts are in the founding documents rather than in the filing itself.
