How to issue share certificates without a single piece of paper

How to issue share certificates without a single piece of paper

Author: Scarlett Pierce
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Read time:  3 minutes
Published date:  2 August 2021
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Updated date:  14 March 2024
In this article, we explain how Capdesk makes the process of issuing & managing share certificates for your shareholders easy, with our digitised solution

For startups and scale-ups, share certificates are a fact of life. Fast growth means you’re regularly issuing shares to employees, advisors and new investors, which means you’re regularly grappling with share certification.

The manual process is anything but efficient: filling a template with certificate information, printing it, signing it by hand and finally posting it to the shareholder. Keeping track of paper certificates and replacing any that get misplaced is yet another time-consuming task.

The good news? Carta makes all this a thing of the past. We’ve converted share certificate issuances into an entirely digital process, which takes a matter of minutes and is just as reliable as old-school methods.

If you've enabled the shareholder register and share certificate functions in your Capdesk account settings, share certificates are automatically produced every time a shareholder receives shares in your company. 

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Once the share certificate feature is active in your account, you’ll need to adjust the settings to suit your company’s needs and upload a template before generating share certificates.

 

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Each time a share certificate is generated, you have a choice: you and your witness can sign the certificate immediately to make it official, or you can save it in draft mode. Either way, you’ll be able to see the status of every share certificate in your account by visiting the certificates tab under ‘Shares’.

 

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You and your witness can sign share certificates electronically via DocuSign. The remaining information is completed automatically, using data from your shareholder register.

 

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Once signed, the share certificate is stored securely on the platform and can be exported as a PDF at any time. The new shareholder will be notified automatically and prompted to log into their account, where they can access their certificate.

Any share certificates issued and signed offline can also be stored on the platform. Simply upload each document as a PDF file and assign it to the relevant shareholder to ensure it’s visible in their account.

Whenever shares are cancelled or sold, the shareholder’s certificate is automatically updated to reflect the change. It will remain on file for record-keeping purposes.

 

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