The two phrases you gave,
- The time has come for you to take over the company.
- It is time for you to take over the company.
have the same meaning, but the first is more poetic. It might be correct to say the first phase is an idiom. It's true that you have the present perfect of an active verb "to come" but the subject doing the action is "time". What? Time can't do anything!
After I first read your question I was thinking of a song I heard long ago which repeated the phrase "the time has come," and it turns out I was thinking of the 1987 song "Beds are Burning" by the Australian rock band Midnight Oil. But the search engine completion options reminded me of an example from a century earlier, which is from a poem that appears in the novel Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll:
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—-and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings."
Now at the risk of stating the obvious, a marine mammal of the species Odobenus rosmarus is speaking in this stanza. Oh, and the novel is about a 7-year-old girl called Alice who climbs up on the mantel above her fireplace where there is a mirror (that is, a "looking-glass") hanging on the wall. She finds to her surprise that she is able to step through the mirror, and she goes on to explore the world on the other side of the mirror.
In this case the poetic "metrical foot" contains two syllables with stress on the second. Each line has eight syllables which equals four feet, and for example in the first line the stress is on time, come, Wal-, and said.
Maybe the Walrus was not speaking grammatically correct and the first line should read,
"It is time," the Walrus said,
but that really doesn't work because now the line has the wrong number of syllables, and neither of the first two syllables is stressed. It completely mangles the poem.
So in this example, the Walrus must say "the time has come" for poetic reasons, not for grammatical reasons.
I don't know if Through the Looking Glass is the first place where "the time has come" was used to mean "it is time." But I can imagine that Australian rockers had heard of Lewis Carroll, or that other songwriters who have used the same phrase read the novel as children.
Yesterday refers to time in the past. If the headache has passed, you no longer have it:
I had a headache yesterday.
If your headache began yesterday and you still have it:
I have had a headache since yesterday.
Let's say you've acted grumpily towards someone and you want to apologize:
I'm sorry. I have had a bad headache all day.
You still have the headache. It began in the past (perhaps this morning) and has persisted.
Merely a causal connection between a past event and the present is not sufficient grounds to use the present perfect. If there is a time phrase relegating the action to the past, you cannot use the present perfect in that clause. If the time phrase excludes the present, the present perfect cannot be used in that clause.
He robbed a bank five years ago. And now he is in prison.
He robbed a bank early this morning, and he will go to prison for it.
He robbed a bank in his youth and he went to prison for it.
But contemplate this:
You have robbed a bank and now you are going to prison.
There is no time phrase relegating the robbery to the past, no time phrase which excludes the present; the speaker, by choosing the present perfect, is expressing a relationship of the past event to the present.
Here's how you might translate it on a semantic level:
He robbed a bank ~ he was a bank robber
He has robbed a bank ~ he is a bank robber
Best Answer
While both are technically grammatically correct, in general, using the past tense for that sort of question is more idiomatic and sounds more natural:
Using the present perfect in this case may sound a bit strange.
However, the present perfect form is sometimes used to imply that the asker is more interested not in knowing where it was before, but rather how it came to be here now:
vs.
The present perfect is also used more often / interchangeably when talking about ideas rather than physical objects, to ask about the process by which something came about. As an example, these two statements mean pretty much the same thing, and both sound perfectly natural:
But in general, if you're talking about a physical thing, and you want to know where it was before it was here, the simple past form is usually what you want.
As a side-note, when responding to a question in the present perfect, the answer is usually stated simply in the past tense, so even assuming the present perfect was correct for the question, this answer doesn't really sound right:
Instead, that case should probably be phrased as: