The agent quoted you ₦45,000 to file a form that prints the government's own fee on the receipt

You are not confused about CAC. You are confused about the price.

You know registration exists. You know you need it — the bank said so, or the client's procurement person said so, or you want to stop receiving business money in a personal account. What you do not know is what it should cost. So the quote arrives — ₦45,000, ₦60,000, ₦85,000 for "limited company, complete" — and you have no way to test it. You ask a friend, and the friend paid a different number to a different person for something that may or may not have been the same thing. You search online and find a fee table with no date on it. You ask the agent to explain, and he explains in a tone that makes further questions feel rude. So the decision becomes a feeling. Does this person seem honest. That is not a decision, that is a coin toss, and you have already lost that toss before — the deposit that went nowhere, the WhatsApp that stopped replying, the certificate that came back with your name spelt wrong and a resubmission fee attached. The other thing you have not said out loud: you have been trading unregistered for a while now. Two years, four years. Part of you suspects that registering is the same as raising your hand, and you do not know what happens after you raise it. So you have quietly postponed the whole thing for another quarter.

Read the receipt before you pay, not after

A CAC filing produces a payment record that separates the government's charge from everything else. Once you can read that separation, an inflated quote stops being a suspicion and becomes an arithmetic problem — and arithmetic problems have answers. The guide takes you through it in order. Which registration type your situation actually calls for, and why for many small traders and service businesses it is the cheaper one, not the limited company the agent led with. How to choose a name that survives availability search instead of burning your first attempt. What documents and identity records to have scanned and correctly named before you open the portal — because the most common rejections are mismatches you could have caught in ten minutes at your kitchen table. Then the portal itself, screen by screen, including what to do when it stalls, at each stage where it commonly stalls. Then the certificate to corporate account to TIN sequence, in the order the bank will actually ask for things. And chapter 7 handles the unregistered years. Not with reassurance — with detail. What registration does and does not expose, what the practical position is, and the exact point where you should stop reading a ₦12,000 book and pay a chartered accountant instead, with the questions to ask them and a realistic range for what that conversation costs. If you finish the book and decide to use an agent anyway, that is a fine outcome. You will hand him a broken-down quote instead of a hopeful transfer. If his price turns out to be fair, the price comparison chapter says so plainly — it is not written to make you distrust every agent in Nigeria.

What you get

• Register Your Business With CAC Without Paying Blind — 104-page PDF guide — The full walkthrough: which registration your bank or client actually needs, name selection that survives search, document assembly, the line-by-line split between official CAC charge and agent service fee, the portal filed step by step including what to do at each point it stalls, certificate to corporate account to TIN, and how to handle years of trading that happened before registration.
• The Quote Breakdown Sheet — what to ask your agent before you pay — One page you fill in with the agent's own figures: registration type, official fee, name reservation, stamp duty where applicable, service fee, who holds the portal login, what is returned to you and when. Seven questions in the order that makes an inflated quote collapse on its own — and the three answers that mean walk away.
• Document and Identity Pre-Flight Checklist — Exactly what to scan and how to name it before you touch the portal: NIN and how the name on it must match, means of identification, address details, objects wording, passport photograph specification, signature format — plus the five mismatches behind the most rejections and how to fix each before it costs you a resubmission.
• The First 60 Days After the Certificate — A dated sequence for the weeks nobody warns you about: what the bank asks for beyond the certificate, TIN registration, what your state internal revenue service expects and when, annual return timing, and the two filings people miss in year one and pay penalties for in year three.
• The Name Rejection List — The categories CAC refuses or queries — restricted words, implied government affiliation, near-identical existing names, descriptive-only names — with before-and-after examples for trading businesses, salons and small services, so your first availability search is not a wasted one.

Includes 4 bonus items.

Questions you’re probably asking

How do I know you are not another person collecting ₦12,000 and going quiet?

Because you can test the book against a public source before you trust it. Every official fee quoted is date-stamped with the CAC page it came from. Open that page, compare the number, and if it has moved, the book tells you where to confirm the current figure. A guide that invites you to check it is a different proposition from one that asks you to believe it. Delivery is a PDF link by email within minutes of payment, plus a WhatsApp copy if the email misbehaves.

I can get this free on YouTube and Facebook groups.

Some of it, yes. What is not free is dated fee sourcing, the separation of official charge from service fee laid out line by line, and the rejection causes with fixes. Free videos also rarely tell you the uncomfortable half: that many people asked for a "CAC certificate" by a bank do not need the registration they are about to buy. If you have already watched three videos and still cannot say what your quote should be, the videos were the wrong instrument.

Can I really do this myself, or will I mess it up and lose the money?

The portal is filed by ordinary people every day, and the guide walks each screen. It is also honest about where self-filing goes wrong — name rejections, identity mismatches, objects wording — which is why the pre-flight checklist exists. And if after reading you would rather someone else handles it, that is a legitimate choice. You will just be buying that service with a broken-down quote in your hand instead of a number you cannot test.

I have been trading unregistered for years. Is registering going to open a door I cannot close?

Chapter 7 is entirely about that question, and it does not tell you the unregistered years disappear, because they do not. It sets out what registration does and does not expose, what the practical position tends to be, and the exact point at which you should stop reading and pay a chartered accountant — including what to ask for and a realistic cost range for that engagement. If your situation is past what a book should handle, the book says so instead of taking your money and pretending.

₦12,000 is real money to me right now.

It is. The honest comparison is not ₦12,000 versus zero — it is ₦12,000 versus the difference between a quote you can read and a quote you cannot. If the breakdown sheet moves one inflated quote by more than ₦12,000, or stops you paying for a limited company when your bank would have accepted a business name registration, it has covered itself. If your agent's price turns out to be fair, you will have paid ₦12,000 to know that instead of wondering.