I've never really thought that much about having a company just for branding purposes. But, I've run my business as an official corporation for about 10 years

I've never really thought that much about having a company just for branding purposes. But, I've run my business as an official corporation for about 10 years now, even though I haven't been 100% freelance for all of that time. There's some running costs for the corporation itself, but but it has a lot of benefits, tax deductions being an obvious one. Also if you don't have a corporate tax ID and bank account, then some clients may insist on withholding taxes and pay you as regular employee, so that they don't look like they're trying to dodge payroll tax. Again this affects your ability to control your own salary and tax filing and you can avoid it by billing them as an officially registered corporation with checks written out to your company, not your personal name. The corporation also helps if you bring on more people to help because you can pay them properly with tax withholding and everything is legit. It's not really that much work using an online Payroll service. I definitely recommend it if you are earning more than a few thousand dollars per year.