Bringing an entity back, state by state.

Not necessarily. An administrative lapse is a status on the register, not the end of the entity, and most states publish a route back from it. What differs is how long that route stays open, how many offices have to agree, and what has to be brought current before anyone will look at the application. Your state page is where the limit, if there is one, is set out.

It depends almost entirely on how many offices touch the file. Where the registry handles it alone, the work is mostly the backlog. Where a state requires its tax authority to clear the entity first, that clearance sets the pace and the registry step is short by comparison. The sequence matters more than the paperwork: two queues run one after the other, not at once.

In most states, yes. Reinstatement usually means bringing the entity current, not starting fresh, so the cycles that were missed while it was lapsed are filed in order as part of the repair. This is why a short lapse and a long one are very different pieces of work, even though the reinstatement application at the end of them looks identical.

It is a different thing rather than a shortcut. A new entity has a new formation date, a new record, and no connection to the history of the old one, and the name may or may not still be available to it. Reinstatement repairs what already exists. Which route fits depends on what the old entity holds and what depends on it, and the state page sets out what each one requires.

It returns the entity to the register in good standing. How far back that reaches is a state question: some states treat the entity as having continued without interruption, others restore it from the date the application is granted. Because that difference matters for anything signed during the gap, it is one of the first things each state page addresses.

Usually because someone else looked. The status sits on the state's public business search, so it surfaces when a bank, a buyer, an insurer or a court checks the record, which is rarely a convenient moment. The state's own notices go to the address and the agent on file, and if either of those is stale the first real warning is somebody else's search.