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Lenders, counterparties, and the states a business registers in ask for official documents, such as a certificate of good standing. A document request orders the document from the authority that issues it and stores it on the business record, where you can download it for as long as you hold the record. A request needs a document type and one of these: a Palm ID, a registration number with its jurisdiction, or the ID of a business in your portfolio. Palm places the order and delivers what the authority issues, unchanged.
Early access. The document request endpoints are in preview and may change in backwards-incompatible ways before they are marked stable. Contact us before building on them.

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How it works

  1. Identify the registration. By Palm ID, by jurisdiction and registration number, or by a business in your portfolio.
  2. Estimate the government fee. See what the state charges and the expedited tiers it sells.
  3. Request the document. Palm accepts the request at once and places the order.
  4. Track it. Follow it from queued to completed, driven by webhooks.
  5. Read the result. The document, or what the authority returned instead, is on the business record.

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Documents you can request

Each document is defined by the authority that issues it, so its name and what it covers differ by state. Each type’s section below says where it is available and for which entity types. A request outside that returns 422 not_requestable and orders nothing. The fee estimate returns the same answer, so you can check before you request.

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Certificate of standing

A certificate of standing is the short-form certificate a state’s filing office issues about a registration’s status, as of the issue date. States name it differently: certificate of good standing, of status, of existence, of fact, or of subsistence. One type covers all of them, and Palm delivers the document the state issues. The certificate says nothing about ownership, standing with the IRS, standing in any other state, licenses, or financial condition, and it is not updated after issue. Monitor the registration to learn when standing changes. It is available for LLCs and corporations registered in Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Wyoming. The state sets the processing time, from minutes online to several business days. Where it sells faster processing, the fee estimate lists the tiers. Registry detail returns the registration’s status and standing from the state record in seconds, with no government fee. Use it to decide, and order the certificate when a file needs the state’s document. When the state declines to issue a certificate, for example because the registration is not in good standing, the request completes without one. See What a completed request carries.

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Identify the registration

Identify the registration with exactly one of:
  • palm_id, as returned by registry search.
  • registration_jurisdiction with registration_number.
  • business_id, a business in your portfolio.
Each names one registration, and Palm orders from that registration’s jurisdiction. An identifier that does not resolve to one registration returns an error and creates nothing:
  • 400 Zero identifiers, or more than one.
  • 404 Nothing matches.
  • 422 ambiguous_registration The registration number matches several records. The response lists the candidates. Resubmit with the palm_id you want.
  • 422 not_requestable The document is not available for that registration.
If the registration is not in your portfolio, Palm adds the business, bound to the registry record, and returns its id as business_id. The documents are stored on that business.

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Estimate the government fee

Bash
The response estimates the state’s fees by component, with a total of those fees that assumes card payment. It does not include Palm’s fee for the request. Where the state sells faster processing, it also lists expedited_tiers with the surcharge each adds. Pass expedited_tier to price one in, and a tier the state does not offer returns 400 that names the tiers it does. Every figure is an estimate. See Get document request fee estimate.

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Request the document

Bash
Send the type and one identifier. You can add expedited_tier to order at one of the state’s speeds, and metadata, up to 50 key-value pairs of your own that Palm echoes on the request and on every webhook about it. Palm checks the identifier, the coverage, and the tier before it creates anything, then returns 201 with the request queued and fulfills it asynchronously. If the order cannot be queued, the request returns 503 and creates nothing, so retry it. See Request a document.

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Track the request

Bash
queued means Palm has accepted the request. processing means Palm’s operations team is working the order with the authority. completed means the authority has issued the document or declined to, and completed_at is set. No status waits on a response from you. document_request.processing and document_request.completed fire at each transition and carry the request in full on data.object. Before completion, a document.created event fires for each document Palm stores on the business. See Webhooks and List document requests.

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What a completed request carries

documents lists every file the order produced, each with its types and uploaded_at. The same files are on the business record.
  • The authority issued the document. One entry carries the request’s type. The receipt, where there is one, is typed receipt. Anything else is typed other.
  • The authority declined to issue the document, for example because the registration is not in good standing. The request completes without it, and documents holds what the authority returned instead: its refusal or a status printout typed other, and the receipt where a fee was charged.
Read a document with Retrieve document metadata and Download a document. A certificate carries two dates: uploaded_at, when Palm stored it, and metadata.issued_date, the date the state printed on it. Palm sets no validity period, and the party that requires the certificate decides how recent it must be, so show both dates. Most states also print a certificate number, which lets a reviewer confirm the certificate with the state directly.

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Test mode

A request on a test key places no order. It moves to processing and completes within about a minute with a sample certificate on the test business, and fires the same webhooks as live. Set _simulate to refused in metadata and it completes with a sample refusal and no certificate. See Test mode.

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Next steps