Business Registration
Before a US carrier will deliver texts from your phone numbers — or show your name on your calls instead of a warning label — it wants to know which real, legally registered business is behind them. Business Registration is where you tell it, once, and then keep track of what has been approved.
You will find it in the organization sidebar under Compliance
(/o/{organization}/business). It is an organization-level area rather than a workspace
one, because a legal business is bigger than any single workspace: one verified business
can back the phone numbers used by every workspace underneath it.
Why carriers ask for any of this
Text messages sent by software to a person's mobile phone travel over a lane US carriers police heavily, because it is the lane spam and fraud use. The carriers' answer was to stop accepting anonymous traffic on it. Every sender now has to be identified in advance: a named legal business, a name that messages visibly come from, and a written description of what those messages are and why the people receiving them agreed to them.
That is the whole logic behind every field in this section. Nothing here is Gravity Rail asking for paperwork. Each field is something a carrier reviewer reads, checks against a public record, and uses to decide whether your messages are delivered or silently dropped.
Calls work differently. A call goes out whether or not you register anything — but unregistered calls arrive with no proof they are really from you, so networks are free to label them "Spam Likely" or show a bare number. Voice registration is about how your calls are treated, not whether they are allowed.
The chain: Business → Brand → Campaign → numbers
Four things stack up, each one hanging off the one above it:
| Thing | What it is | How many |
|---|---|---|
| Business | The legal entity — the name and tax ID on your government registration. | One per legal entity you text or call as |
| Brand | The name your texts visibly come from. | One per business |
| Campaign | A single messaging program: what you send and why recipients agreed to it. | Created against a brand |
| Phone numbers | The numbers actually allowed to send under that campaign. | As many as you like |
Read it as a sentence: this legal business sends texts under this name, as part of this program, from these numbers. A carrier can audit every link in that sentence, and that is exactly what it does.
The app follows the same shape. The list in Compliance shows your businesses. Open one and you get its Status, its Business details, its Brands and its Campaigns. Nothing floats free of the business it belongs to.
Two modules: Messaging and Voice
A verified business feeds two separate registrations that have nothing to do with each other:
- Messaging — brand and campaign registration, which is what unlocks outbound texting. Covered by Brands and Campaigns.
- Voice — three independent items that make your outbound calls trusted, unlabelled, and named. Covered by Outbound calling.
They share one thing only: the verified business underneath. Approving your business unlocks both; after that, neither waits on the other. You can register for texting and never touch voice, or set up caller ID and never send a text.
What actually has to happen in order
Most of this can be filled in whenever it suits you. Only a few real dependencies exist, and they exist because a carrier will not accept the later item until the earlier one is approved.
Genuinely sequential:
- The business is verified first. Registering a brand and setting up any voice item both require the business to be Approved. There is no way around this — the registration is filed as that business.
- A brand comes before its campaign. A campaign describes what a brand sends, so there has to be a brand to describe.
- Opt-in evidence comes before the campaign is submitted. Approving your sample messages is blocked until a real opt-in surface exists, because that link is what the reviewer opens.
- Numbers are enabled last. A phone number can only be switched on for sending once its campaign is verified.
Not sequential — do it whenever:
- Every form accepts what you know now. The business details save as a draft at any completeness, and the voice setup forms are open for typing before the business is verified. Only the submit control waits on a prerequisite, and when it does it says so on screen. You never have to finish one thing to start writing down another.
- Campaign copy and opt-in evidence can be written while the brand is in carrier review. This is the single biggest time-saver in the whole section. The brand review is dead time otherwise, and the copy steps are visible from the moment brand registration starts precisely so you can use it.
How long things take
Carrier review is a queue with humans in it, and the app never pretends otherwise.
| Step | What the app tells you |
|---|---|
| Business verification | Typically 1–3 business days |
| Brand registration | Typically a few days |
| Campaign review | Typically days, occasionally weeks |
| Voice items | No estimate is shown — watch the item's own status |
Two things follow from this. First, start the business verification before you need it, not on the week you want to launch. Second, a step sitting at In review for a day is not stuck — that is the normal state.
Every item carries its own status
There is deliberately no single "compliance: approved" light anywhere in this section, because there is no single thing to approve. Your business, your brand, your campaign and each of the three voice items are separate submissions to separate reviewers, and they finish at different times. A business can be approved while its campaign is still in review; caller ID can be approved while spam-label protection has not been requested.
So the Status page shows a status per item, and the vocabulary is honest about the difference between filled in and approved by a carrier.
Reading the Status page
Opening a business lands you here — the page that answers "where has this business actually got to?" Across the top are four views: Status, Business, Brands and Campaigns, plus a switcher on the business name for jumping to another business without going back to the list.
The verification card
The card at the top is about the business itself — the legal identity carriers check before anything else can happen. While you are filling it in it shows a progress bar, a percentage, and a Still needed line naming the sections with empty required fields.
Two things about that percentage. It is measured against the saved profile, not what is currently on your screen, so it always means "this much of what a carrier would see today". And it stops at 90%, not 100: filling the form in is most of the job, but the business is not registered until it has been submitted, so submitting is the last tenth. A full bar over a business no carrier has seen would be claiming a finish line it has not crossed.
When every required field is present, the card drops the explanatory line and promotes its button instead — the bar sits at 90% and the button becomes Submit for review. The promotion is the signal.
| Status | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Not started | Nothing saved yet. | Open Business and start filling it in. |
| In progress | Saved, but required fields are still empty. | Finish the fields named in Still needed. |
| Ready to submit | Every required field is present and saved. | Submit it for carrier review. |
| In review | Submitted; a carrier reviewer has it. | Wait — typically 1–3 business days. The form is read-only meanwhile. |
| Approved | Carriers verified the business. | Nothing. Brand registration and voice setup are now open. |
| Needs changes | Carriers rejected something. | Open Business, fix what the banner names, resubmit. |
Approved means approved by a carrier — never "you finished typing". That distinction is the reason the vocabulary has both Ready to submit and Approved in it, and the reason green is used only once the carrier has said yes.
A banner above the card carries anything the carrier said back, including the specific reasons behind a rejection. Read that before editing anything: it names what to change.
The two modules
Below the card the page splits in two, because a business feeds two registrations that do not depend on each other.
Messaging — headed Outbound texting setup, a numbered checklist with a "done out of total" count. Each row carries its own status and, where there is something to do, its own button.
| Step | What it is | Typically waiting on |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Business verification | The same verification as the card above. | Your details, then carrier review |
| 2. Brand registration | Registering the name your texts come from. | An approved business |
| 3. Campaign registration | The copy, the opt-in evidence, and the carrier's verdict on them. | Brand registration having started |
| 4. Sending on phone numbers | Switching sending on per number. | A verified campaign |
Campaign registration is one step rather than several because it is one thing with parts: you write the copy, publish the opt-in evidence carriers will check, approve the sample messages — and that submission is what the carrier reviews. The row's status tells you which part it is on.
It opens as soon as brand registration starts, not when the brand is approved. That is on purpose: the brand sits in carrier review for days, and this is exactly the work you can do during that wait.
Voice — headed Outbound calling, three items independent of texting and of each other: Verify calls, Protect against spam labels, and Show your business name. Each shows its own status and expands to its own short setup form, and all three need only an approved business. Outbound calling covers what each one does.
The refresh control in that module's header re-reads the current state from the provider. Use it if a status looks stale, or if something was set up outside the app.
Status words on individual items
Brand, campaign and voice items report their own state, in a smaller vocabulary than the business uses:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Not set up / Not started | Never submitted. Nothing is in flight. |
| Saved | Typed and stored, not yet sent. Voice items submit themselves once the business is verified. |
| In review / Pending verification | Submitted; a reviewer has it. |
| Approved / Enabled | Cleared. |
| Needs changes | Rejected, or stopped in a way that needs you. |
When a step needs attention, its note says which kind of problem it is, because the two need opposite responses. "Needs updated information" means a carrier rejected something and you have to change it before retrying. "Registration stopped before it finished" means nothing is wrong with your data — the run ended early and simply needs restarting. Restarting does not charge the brand registration fee again.
When something says In review, the useful action is usually none. Check back rather than resubmitting.
Who actually files the registration
Gravity Rail files these registrations with the carriers on your behalf. Your business, your brand and your campaigns are registered as yours — your legal name, your tax ID, your representative — not as Gravity Rail's, and your approvals belong to you. The plumbing that carries the paperwork is ours; the identity being verified is yours, which is why the details have to be your real ones and why an approved profile is locked afterwards.
Where to go next
- Your businesses — the list, what its rows and counts mean, and when you would have more than one business.
- Business details — every field carriers check, why they check it, and what happens after you submit.
- Brands — the name your texts come from.
- Campaigns — what you send, and the consent behind it.
- Outbound calling — verified calls, spam-label protection, and caller-ID name.
Related
- Phone & Voice — buying numbers and configuring what they do once they are registered.
- Organizations — the organization these businesses belong to.
- Sites — the published pages an enrollment form can live on.