Service de la promotion économique, rue des Battoirs 7, Genève

http://ge.ch/dares/promotion-economique/accueil.html

Good luck

Karo

I have gone through this process. I advise you to contact a notary (there are plenty of English speaking notaries in GE) and they will take you through the process, register your business and sort out most of the admin. for approx. CHF2000. The first question you may want to ask yourself is why GE?? You can register in Canton Zug (approx. 6% corporation tax, as opposed to 30% in GE) if you pay a Zug-based lawyer to allow you to use their office as your company register address - that costs approx. CHF2000/a.

Thank you very much spikings ! I had heard about Zug reduced tax advantages!! All the best.Julia

As always the answer is "it depends".  Do you want to start a company, work as self employed?  And where do you live - France or Switzerland?

Starting a company such an an Sarl will cost 20k in share capital, with approximately 4k in notary fees. 

Registering as self employed can be tricky if you have less than 4 customers (a bit of a chicken and egg situation) plus if the business doesn't work out you won't be able to get any unemployment benefit.

One new solution is to use a hosting company such as Swiss Labour Contractors  where you become an employee, so get full socila protection, insurances, pension scheme, etc, and all the administration is taken care of, such as VAT, company admin, but if the business works out you can start up your own one when you are big enough.  Best of all there is no need to put the 20k up front.  They have a site at www.swisslabourcontractors.com