There are three key elements involved in filling out the business form: business category, unit type and nature of business. The following is a detailed description of these categories:

The category of business mainly includes agriculture, industry, and services (such as post and telecommunications, communications, community services, wholesale and retail, transportation, construction and installation, health care, urban construction, tourism and catering, etc.). The types of units cover government departments, educational institutions (colleges and universities), scientific research institutions (research institutes), state-owned enterprises, collective enterprises, joint-stock cooperative enterprises, joint ventures, limited liability companies, joint stock limited companies, private enterprises, foreign-funded enterprises (Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan businessmen and foreign-invested enterprises) and other types of organizational forms. As for the nature of the enterprise, the main distinction between state-owned, cooperative (such as joint ventures, cooperative system), private, self-employed, customs clearance enterprises and other forms of business ownership.

At the legal level, the classification of enterprises is mainly based on the composition of capital, form of liability and legal status, and our legislation usually divides the types of enterprises based on the form of ownership. With the development of market economy, China has taken sole proprietorships, partnerships and corporations as the basic categorization, and has enacted relevant laws such as the Company Law, the Partnership Law and the Sole Proprietorship Law respectively.

In addition, China also categorizes enterprises according to economic types, such as state-owned economy, collective ownership, private economy, joint-venture economy, joint-stock economy and foreign-related economy, which affects the setting of legal types of enterprises and forms a special mode of determining the types of enterprises according to economic types.