Yes, Eqvista supports both uncertified (electronic) shares and certified (digital or paper) shares. Both electronic certificates and paper certificates are similar, meaning the bylaws and charters are not affected. The main difference between them is that electronic certificates are stored electronically instead of on paper.

Here are the steps for how you can view your digital certificate or print the paper certificate on Eqvista.

Step 1: Once you are logged into the Eqvista platform, click on the “Cap table” option on the left side column of the dashboard. Then click on “Detail”. You would reach the following page.

Cap table

While on the page, click on your name or the shareholder’s name for whom you want to view the share certificate. For instance, we can click on Dylan O’Brien here as shown above to be directed to the page where we can see all shares owned by Dylan.


Step 2: By clicking on the name “Dylan O’Brien”, you would be directed to the following page where you would be able to see all the details of Dylan along with what and how many shares he holds in the company. Now to see the share certificate, you would have to click on the first row with the certificate number “CS-111”.

shareholder overview

Step 3: By clicking on “CS-111”, you would be directed to the following page, showing you the grant details.

Equity grant details

Here, you would be able to view details like the certificate number, the name of the holder, the date of issuance, the number of shares issued, price per share when it was issued, security name (the name of the equity class), and the capital (the total amount of all the shares).

You will also be able to see all the vesting details of the grant.

Note: These are just the grant details of the cap table, and is an uncertified share certificate. To obtain the certified or digital certificate, you will have to sign the certificate electronically and get the shareholder to do that too. And after that, the shareholder will be able to download it or save it electronically.

In short, you will have to create the share certificate so that it can be saved electronically or downloaded. The next steps will help you in doing this.


Step 4: To get the official share certificate, you will have to go to “Company” and then “Certificates” on the left-side menu to reach the following page.

Certificates

Here, you will see any certificates that have been created. And to create a new certificate, click on “Create Certificate”.


Step 5: Once you do this, you will be redirected to the following page:

Create certificates

Here, you will need to select the equity class from where the shareholder received their shares. In this case, Dylan is a founder and received the founder shares.

Click on the field below the Select Equity Class label. A list will appear of all the equity classes in the company. We select “founders” in this case.


Step 6: As soon as you select the equity class, the shareholders who have received shares under this class would show up.

Select equity grants

Now select the shareholder whose share certificate you want to create. Here, we selected “Dylan”.


Step 7: The moment you select the shareholder, their share certificate number shows up on the side under selected. (You can see the highlighted number in the image below CS-111).

share certificate number

Note: You can select more than one person here. In short, you can select both William and Dylan if you want to create the certificate for both of them.

We are going to use Dylan only. So, once done, click on “Next”.


Step 8: The next step includes assigning either the admin or the superuser of the company profile to sign off the certificate, allowing you to download it.

assigning either the admin or the superuser

Select the person (from the company users) who would execute this process. The users that can be seen in this part are only the administrators and the superuser of the profile. In this case, we selected “Isaac White”.

After that, you will also have to select the role of the executor, which can be the – director or secretary. Here, Isaac is the secretary.

Note: The person who is selected to execute and sign the certificate should be either the director or the secretary.

As soon as you are done with this, click on “Next”.


Step 9: The next step is where you check if you have selected the right shareholder and right executor.

right shareholder and right executor

If there is any error, you can click on the option “Back” and edit everything where needed. If you are good to go, click on “Submit”.


Step 10: When you click on “Submit”, the certificate is created and the executor gets a request to sign the certificate so that it can be downloaded.

Your sign is required

Since Isaac here is the executor and the superuser as well, he can directly click on the certificate again and sign it. You can see the option that says, “Your sign is required” which only comes for the executor.

To sign the certificate and download it, click on “View certificate”.


Step 11: You will be directed to the next page where you can now see the electronic share certificate. This certificate can be downloaded directly by the executor without signing it – as mentioned under the download certificate button.

download certificate button

But for you to be able to download it, you need to click on the link in the message as shown below:

download without signature

If you want to sign the certificate and then download it, you need to click on the box above your name and below the message – “This certificate is hereby executed by”.

To sign it, click on the box and two buttons will appear. The space for the signature would also become available and your cursor would turn into a plus sign. Using this plus sign and the mouse, draw your signature in the box. Once you are done, click on the “tick” above the box. If you want to re-do the signature, you can click on the “restore arrow” button beside the “tick” button above the signing space, as shown below:

signature box

This is how the sign would look like when you use your cursor to sign the certificate.

User signature

Step 12: Once you are done, click on the “tick” and the certificate will be signed. This is how the certificate would look now:

download certificate

You can see that the “download certificate” button is now available. This means that the shareholder can now download the certificate. This is how the digital certificate and the paper certificate look like.

And just like this, you can easily get the uncertified and certified share certificate on Eqvista. If you have any doubts or want to know more, check out the other support articles here.

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