The paperwork
Why your business texts need registering, and what that actually involves.
Every US business sending automated texts has to register with the carriers first. Here is what the registration is, what it needs from you, how long it really takes, and what happens to businesses that skip it.
What the acronym actually means
A2P is application-to-person: a text sent by software rather than by a human thumb. 10DLC is a ten-digit long code, which is the ordinary local phone number your business would text from.
Put together, A2P 10DLC is the US carriers' rule for software sending texts from a normal business number. It exists because carriers got tired of spam arriving from numbers nobody could trace, and the fix was to make every legitimate sender register a real company against the number first.
It is not optional, it is not specific to any one provider, and there is no version of automated business texting in the United States that avoids it.
The four stages, in order
Stage 1
The brand
Your business is registered as an identity: legal name exactly as it appears on your tax paperwork, EIN, address, and website. The details are checked against public records, so a legal name that doesn't match the EIN is the single most common reason this stalls.
Stage 2
The campaign
Separately, you register what you intend to send. That means the use case — customer care and appointment reminders, in our case — sample messages, and how a customer consents to being texted in the first place.
Stage 3
Carrier review
The registry passes it to the carriers, and they decide. This is the part with no fast lane: it takes business days, it is out of everyone's hands, and nobody can escalate it for you.
Stage 4
Throughput assigned
Once approved you are given a message rate — how many texts a second the carriers will accept from you. A registered small business gets more than enough for a receptionist; unregistered traffic gets filtered instead.
What you need to hand
- Your legal business name, exactly as it reads on your EIN paperwork
- Your EIN itself
- The business address on file with the IRS
- A working website that describes what the business does
- A contact name, email and phone for the registration
- How customers agree to be texted, in a sentence
What stalls it
- The legal name doesn't match the EIN — a DBA where the registered name was needed.
- No website, or a website that doesn't make it obvious what the business does.
- A vague consent explanation. The carriers want to know how somebody agreed, not that they did.
- Sample messages that read like marketing when the campaign was filed as customer care.
Every one of these is a resubmission, and a resubmission means waiting out the review again from the start.
The consent part, which people skip
The carriers care less about what you send than about how the person agreed to receive it. You need a real answer: they called your business and you replied by text, they ticked a box on your site, they filled in a form. “We bought a list” is not an answer, and it is the fastest route to a rejected campaign.
You also have to honour opt-outs. A customer who replies STOP has to stop receiving messages, permanently and automatically, and that has to work without anybody remembering to do it.
Anyone who tells you they can skip registration is telling you your messages will be filtered. It is the one part of setting this up that nobody can shortcut.
How this works if we do it for you
We file both parts under your business, using your EIN, because the registration has to belong to the company whose customers are being texted. You hand over the details once and we handle the submission and anything the carriers come back with.
The wait is the wait. It is the honest reason setup takes about a week rather than a day, and we would rather say that up front than have you find out on day three. How it works covers the rest of what happens in that week.
Questions people ask about registration
Does this apply to phone calls too?
No. A2P 10DLC covers text messages sent from a standard 10-digit US number. Voice calls are not part of it, and neither are messages sent over WhatsApp, which runs its own approval process entirely.
What happens if a business skips registration?
The messages get filtered. Not bounced with a clear error the customer sees — quietly dropped or heavily throttled, so the business believes it is texting customers and the customers never receive anything. It is the worst possible failure mode, because nothing looks broken.
How long does it actually take?
The paperwork takes under an hour once the details are to hand. Carrier review is the wait, and in our experience it runs somewhere around one to two weeks. Anyone promising same-day approval is describing something they do not control.
Do I need an EIN, or will a sole proprietorship work?
There is a separate registration path for sole proprietors with lower message throughput, so it is possible without one. It is more limited, and if you already have an EIN the standard path is better in every respect.
Is this a one-time thing?
The registration is, but it stays tied to your business and has to be kept accurate. If your legal name, address or use case changes, the registration needs updating or it stops matching what the carriers have on file.
15 minutes. Bring your call log.
We'll count what you actually missed last month and tell you what it cost. If it's not worth fixing, we'll say so.
Or go break the demo first. It costs you nothing to test.