The cost of an office does not establish qualifying business activity. Explain what the organization actually does rather than treating rent as a substitute for operations.
Budget for a real operating plan
Separate the business’s ongoing expenses from evidence preparation and current filing charges. Do not spend on a nominal presence on the assumption that any paid address satisfies the doing-business requirement. Set the budget from documents rather than estimates, in this order.
Begin with the lease or occupancy agreement and the utility accounts, since those show whether premises are used or merely rented. Add the payroll register or contractor payment records, which show whether anyone is actually working. Then add the professional charges for assembling and reviewing evidence, kept on their own line so business spending and filing preparation never blur together.
Any government charge should be checked against the schedule published by the official source on the day the budget is set, not carried over from an earlier matter, because those amounts are revised. A budget assembled this way doubles as an evidence index: every line has a document behind it, and the lines with no document are exactly the parts of the case not yet supported. Hypothetical example: the group employing an industrial designer finds that its overseas office carries rent and no payroll, and the missing payroll line is what the evidence file has to answer.