For privacy matters, you may want to separate your personal and professional lives.
In order to avoid using your private address as the address to receive the mail of your professional activity if you don’t have a physical establishment for your enterprise, you can consider two solutions for your French company.
These are establishing a contract with the national post service (La Poste) to have access to a letterbox (boîte postale) in a place offering such service or by using the services of a business centre.
‘BOÎTE POSTALE’, HOW DOES IT WORK?
As stated above, this service is provided by a post agency and consists of providing you with a new address in their dependencies to receive your mail as well as access to your own letterbox to retrieve your correspondence. This service is normally oriented towards professionals who don’t have their own premises or who don’t have a mail management system, although there’s an option to make an individual use of it should you receive a large amount of mail.
The advantages of this service are:
Separation of your personal and professional correspondence.
Possibility to access your mail at any point during the working hours of the post agency providing you with the service.
While this service may be useful if your only need is to have an externalised letterbox, it presents many limitations:
You have to retrieve your mail personally in the dependencies of the post.
You may not use this address as that of your company. In other words, it cannot be your registered address.
You may not choose your post address, but rather it will have to be the one assigned to your personal residence. It’s possible that your assigned office doesn’t offer the service, thus you cannot enjoy it.
Your letterbox and personal residence have to be in the same city.
It’s possible that some professionals are reluctant to send you mail to a ‘boîte postale’.
Additionally, you may opt for a ‘CEDEX’ service (acronym for Courrier d’Entreprise à Distribution Exceptionnelle, which translates as exceptional distribution enterprise mail), which is, as the name indicates, addressed to companies, and in very rare cases it can be used by particulars. The advantage of the ‘CEDEX’ is that your mail will have priority when being treated. Conversely, the address will have to be written differently depending on your location, so in addition to the postal code, the sender will have to also include the ‘CEDEX’ and the code of the location of your postal service. For example, if your post office is in the 17th neighbourhood of Paris, it’ll be necessary to add the text Paris CEDEX 17 to the address.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE WITH A DOMICILIATION ADDRESS?
When choosing the services of a business centre for your domiciliation, you don’t have a simple letterbox. You can use the address of your business centre as the registered address of your company, and so your privacy will be completely preserved.
Not only that, but also, you may also hire the mail forwarding or digitalisation services that are often proposed by your centre and with which you won’t need to go to the place itself to retrieve your mail since it’ll be sent to you.
Lastly, the location of your centre is completely independent of the location of your personal residence. That means that you don’t even need to be in the same country to have a domiciliation address in a business centre. Additionally, this address will normally be a prestigious one.