A business trading under a DBA belongs on the standard tier
The requirementstatement
A sole-proprietor registration that declares a DBA must be re-filed as a standard brand.
- Severityseverity
- HighHIGHRejected by at least one carrier or provider, and a common cause of failure at the rest.
- When it bitesphase
- Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
- What is checkedobject
- brand.dba + brand.entity_type
- Where it liveslayer
- BrandBRAND
- How Ekas settles itdetectability
- AI · formAI_FORM
- A semantic question about what you wrote: whether a description matches a use case, whether a name looks like a filed entity. Judged by a model against written criteria.
- What the fix involvesfailureClass
- Fix the fieldRETRY_FIELD
- A better value in the form fixes it. Ekas can rewrite it and re-check.
- Who requires itauthorities
- Twilio
- When it appliesapplicabilityText
- Applies when the brand is a sole proprietor.
Why this rule existsrationale
The sole-proprietor tier is for an individual with no business registration at all. A DBA is a business registration — it is filed with a county or state — so declaring one is evidence the applicant qualifies for, and therefore must use, the standard tier. The tiers are not interchangeable: the sole-proprietor path caps throughput hard and verifies by text message, which is a worse deal than the applicant is entitled to.
How to fix itremediation
Apply for an EIN — it is free and issued immediately online — and register as a standard brand with the DBA in its own field. If you would rather stay on the sole-proprietor tier, clear the DBA and register under your own name only. Done when the tier and the presence of a DBA agree.
A compliant exampleexample
entity_type: PRIVATE_PROFIT · company_name: Jane Doe Bodywork, LLC · dba: Jane Doe Bodywork — rather than the sole-proprietor tier with a DBA attached
Common mistakespitfalls
- Waiting for a new EIN to propagate is BRD-027 and costs up to 90 days, so apply for it before you need the brand rather than after this rejection.
Provider rejection codescodes
The code you get back when this rule is what failed, and whether that provider lets you resubmit.
| Provider | Code | Resubmit |
|---|---|---|
| Twilio | 30914 | Yes |
| Twilio | 30918 | Yes |
Notesnotes
A different disqualifier from BRD-065 (an EIN present on a sole-proprietor brand) with a different fix, which is why the catalog keeps them apart.
Rules you will hit next
Other brand rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.
BRD-006Submit every name line above the address on a multi-line IRS recordHighHIGHBRD-007TCR takes only the first line of the IRS-registered nameHighHIGHBRD-010Take the legal name from the CP-575 or 147C, never a W-2 or W-9HighHIGHBRD-014An acquired business registers the details it filed taxes underHighHIGHBRD-027EIN must be old enough to have propagated to IRS recordsHighHIGHBRD-034Validate a non-US identifier against its home register before submittingHighHIGH
BRD-067 is one of 196 brand rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.